American Life in Poetry: Column 244

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Love predated the invention of language, but love poetry got its start as soon as we had words through which to express our feelings. Here’s a lovely example of a contemporary poem of love and longing by George Bilgere, who lives in Ohio.

 

Night Flight

I am doing laps at night, alone
In the indoor pool. Outside
It is snowing, but I am warm
And weightless, suspended and out
Of time like a fly in amber.

She is thousands of miles
From here, and miles above me,
Ghosting the stratosphere,
Heading from New York to London.
Though it is late, even
At that height, I know her light
Is on, her window a square
Of gold as she reads mysteries
Above the Atlantic. I watch

The line of black tile on the pool’s
Floor, leading me down the lane.
If she looks down by moonlight,
Under a clear sky, she will see
Black water. She will see me
Swimming distantly, moving far
From shore, suspended with her
In flight through the wide gulf
As we swim toward land together.

 

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by George Bilgere, whose most recent book of poems is Haywire, Utah State University Press, 2006. Reprinted by permission of George Bilgere. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

 

Beat America

What did we learn from Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg?

By Aram Saroyan
Poetry Media Service

It’s been more than a decade since the death of Allen Ginsberg, but in the interim I’ve found that he’s stayed with me as an informing, tempering, guardian-like presence of a stature equaled only by my late father. He looked me up and down and looked me in the face, taking my measure for good or ill, and then informed me, on several critical occasions, where I had gotten it right or wrong.

As a teenager in Manhattan, I turned to poetry because I couldn’t understand what life was about and thought I might uncover some clues in such writing. Howl, which I found during high school, was like an encyclopedia of the emotional and psychic life that had been driven under in me, with the result that I felt restless and bored a lot of the time. Life is big, it said. It has a lot of colors. It’s serious. It’s funny. It’s full of suffering that is also like bread, nurture, on a journey of the soul.

Allen called me from Naropa one year, trying to track down a photograph of Kerouac that I’d used in Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation. My father had died recently, and Allen told me a story about his father, the late poet Louis Ginsberg, who had been a high school teacher in New Jersey. When he’d visited his father in the hospital during his last illness, Allen said Louis told him that as a little boy he’d lived near a magnificent building, a great tower with chimneys from which, at certain hours of the day, huge plumes of smoke billowed. Louis had dreamed of this building and wondered what went on inside it.

“Do you know what it was, Allen? That great tower that set me dreaming?”

“What, Pop?”

“It was a glue factory.”

During the same call Allen lightened my spirits by telling me how much he liked Genesis Angels, which had received mixed reviews.

During the ’60s, in my minimalist phase as a poet, I ran into Allen one afternoon on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street in New York. I’d just purchased some bell-bottoms and a hippie shirt, thinking I’d take the plunge into my generation’s attire, and Allen looked me over seriously.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Well, I think the clothes are beautiful, so why not wear them?”

He nodded and made no further comment about it, and we got to discussing my one-word poems.

“Are you lazy, or what?” It was the sort of comment that could have come only from Allen or from my father.

“No,” I said.

Ten years later, Allen attended a reading I gave. Afterward, he commented to me that a poem I’d read took an “us-and-them” stance that he considered incorrect. This was priceless information, not about the quality of the poem so much as about how it is one continues to write. It was, as I see it today, part of the higher literary physics that he and Kerouac reinstated, so to speak. The moral example of literature wasn’t judgment, that is, but empathy, which is why Shakespeare is our greatest exemplar. Allen was telling me, in his way, that I had turned down a cul-de-sac.

* * *

The Paris Review interview with Jack Kerouac was the brainchild of Ted Berrigan at a time when, hard as it is to believe, Kerouac was an almost forgotten man. It was a few months before the fabled Summer of Love, 1967, and Ted invited me to accompany him up to Lowell to interview Kerouac. I accepted the invitation on impulse—at that moment of the ’60s I’d very nearly forgotten Kerouac myself.

Ted’s impromptu choreography: Jack had loved my dad’s work, Ted knew, and he also knew I’d be reluctant to come as the ambassador of William Saroyan, as it were, and made his invitation spontaneously casual—and off we went.

During the interview Jack, perhaps intrigued that the son of one of his first literary influences was now looking to him, asked me to repeat after him, line by line, the words of a poem of his from Mexico City Blues:

KEROUAC: Delicate conceptions of kneecaps. Say that, Saroyan.

SAROYAN: Delicate conceptions of kneecaps.

Concluding:

KEROUAC: Like kissing my kitten in the belly

SAROYAN: Like kissing my kitten in the belly

KEROUAC: The softness of our reward

SAROYAN: The softness of our reward

I stumbled once or twice—there were some complicated lines—but a thick-skinned, hardheaded 23-year-old writer was getting some basic training, not in literature per se, but in repeating the words of a master. That is the correct existential posture in the lineage of mystery—surrendering to it—that the Beats revived. So, my young friend, it was as if Kerouac was saying, Let’s appreciate it together; even though I wrote it, it’s both of ours now. When I’d completed this exercise, Jack rewarded me with a modest encomium that has traveled with me down the years and that I’ve tried my best to be worthy of. “You’ll do, Saroyan,” he said.

Aram Saroyan’s Door to the River: Essays and Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age will be published in March 2010 by Black Sparrow/Godine. This article first appeared at www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

© 2009 by Aram Saroyan. All rights reserved.

American Life in Poetry: Column 243

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Lots of contemporary poems are anecdotal, a brief narration of some event, and what can make them rise above anecdote is when they manage to convey significance, often as the poem closes. Here is an example of one like that, by Marie Sheppard Williams, who lives in Minneapolis.

 

Everybody

I stood at a bus corner
one afternoon, waiting
for the #2. An old
guy stood waiting too.
I stared at him. He
caught my stare, grinned,
gap-toothed. Will you
sign my coat? he said.
Held out a pen. He wore
a dirty canvas coat that
had signatures all over
it, hundreds, maybe
thousands.
I’m trying
to get everybody, he
said.
I signed. On a
little space on a pocket.
Sometimes I remember:
I am one of everybody.

 

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2006 by Marie Sheppard Williams. Reprinted from the California Review, Volume 32, no. 4, by permission of Marie Sheppard Williams and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

 

The Linebacker and the Dervish

Lowell’s and Bishop’s collected letters.

By Michael Hofmann
Poetry Media Service

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $45.00.

This is such a formidably and dramatically and lingeringly wonderful book, it is hard to know where to begin. Well, begin in the manner of the physical geographer and the embarrassed statistician and the value-for-money merchant, with quantity, though that’s absolutely the wrong place. Here, then, are 459 letters, 300 of them not previously published, exchanged over 30 years, between 1947 when the two great poets of late-20th-century America first met—Robert Lowell just 30, Elizabeth Bishop 36, each with one trade book and one round of prizes under their belts—and 1977 when Lowell predeceased his friend by two years; covering, all told, some 900 pages, from Bishop end-papers—one hand-scrawled, one typed—to Lowell end-papers—one in his laborious, also not greatly legible child-print (“I know I’m myself beyond self-help; and at least you can spell”), one typed. The apparatus of footnotes, chronology, and compendious glossary of names—take a bow, Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton—is modest, helpful, and accurate. At this point in our post-epistolary (no joke), post-literary, almost post-alphabetical decline, we would probably receive any collection of letters with a feeling of stupefied wistfulness and a sigh of valediction, but Words in Air is way beyond generic. It feels like a necessary and a culminating book, especially for Bishop. To read, it is completely engrossing, to the extent that I feel I have been trekking through it on foot for months, and I don’t know where else I’ve been. “Why, page 351,” I would say. “Letter 229; March 1, 1961. Where did you think?”

But what is it like? How, in fact, do you read it? “I am underlining like Queen Victoria,” Bishop remarks at one stage. How do you filter, assimilate, crunch it down to the space of a review? Its 800 pages of letters—every one of them bearing my ambiguous slashes of delight, interest, controversy, revelation—still left me with eight sheets full of page numbers of my own. It’s like starting with a city, and ending up with a phone book—hardly useful as a redaction. Really, I might as well have held a pencil to the margin and kept it there, for bulk reread.

It’s an epistolary novel—if not a full-blown romance, then at least, at moments, an amitié amoureuse. It’s a variation on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Or it’s an Entwicklungsroman in later life, both parties already poets but perhaps more importantly still on the way to becoming poets (echoing the title of David Kalstone’s study), as perhaps one only ever and always is becoming a poet. It’s an ideally balanced, ideally complex account of a friendship, a race, a decades-long conspiracy, a dance (say, a tango?). It’s a cocktail of infernal modesty and angelic pride. It’s a further episode in Bishop’s increasingly sweeping posthumous triumph over her more obvious, more ambitious, more square-toed friend. It’s a rat-a-tat-tat ping-pong rally, an artillery exchange, a story told in fireworks, a trapeze show. One can read it for gifts sent up and down the Atlantic, from Lowell’s traditional Northeast seaboard to Bishop’s serendipitously-arrived-at Brazil, where she mostly lived from 1951 on, having arrived on a freighter for a short visit; for projects completed, adapted, revised, abandoned, published, and responded to; for blurbs solicited, struggled with, and delivered to greater or lesser satisfaction; for houses bought and done up and left; for other partners encountered and set down; for visits and time together passionately contrived, put off, and subsequently held up to memory or guiltily swept under the carpet; for gossip and the perennial trade in reputations; for a startlingly unabashed revelation of mutual career aid (“we may be a terrible pair of log-rollers, I don’t know,” writes Bishop in 1965, having asked Lowell for a blurb for Questions of Travel after he had asked her for one for Life Studies ); for loyalty and demurral, independent thinking and prudent silence, insistent generosity and occasional self-seeking; a longing to submit to the other’s perceived discipline and a desire to offer unconditional admiration; for personal, professional, and public events. One can read it for movements of place, for gaps in time, and discrepancies and disharmonies in feeling or balance; for the dismayed Bishop’s agonized criticism of aspects of two of Lowell’s books, the rather coarse free translations in Imitations of 1961 and the use of private letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in The Dolphin of 1973; for various other crises and cruxes: their heady, teasy-flirty mutual discovery of 1947, Bishop’s difficult visit to a near-manic Lowell in Maine in 1957, Lowell’s visit to Brazil and another manic episode in 1962, the death by suicide of Bishop’s companion Lota de Macedo Soares in 1967, Bishop’s uneasy return to Boston (to fill in for Lowell’s absence, if you please), and Lowell’s ultimate shuttling between wives and countries of the late ’70s. It’s social history, comedy of manners, American dissidence, the search for a style. It’s not least a gender myth more astute about men and women than that of Atalanta and Hippolytus (in any case, I always think Atalanta, like Bishop, should have won—she should have been provided with the apples, and Hippolytus, the ambitious, distractable male, goofed off in their pursuit, rather than the other way round). He is her anchor, she his kite.

Excerpted from “The Linebacker and the Dervish,” originally published in the January 2009 issue of Poetry magazine. Michael Hofmann’s most recent collection of poetry, Selected Poems (April 2009), was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is currently working on translations of Gottfried Benn. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Michael Hofmann. All rights reserved.

American Life in Poetry: Column 242

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

There are lots of poems in which a poet expresses belated appreciation for a parent, and if you don’t know Robert Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” you ought to look it up sometime. In this lovely sonnet, Kathy Mangan, of Maryland, contributes to that respected tradition.

 

The Whistle

You could whistle me home from anywhere
in the neighborhood; avenues away,
I’d pick out your clear, alternating pair
of notes, the signal to quit my child’s play
and run back to our house for supper,
or a Saturday trip to the hardware store.
Unthrottled, wavering in the upper
reaches, your trilled summons traveled farther
than our few blocks. I’ve learned too, how your heart’s
radius extends, though its beat
has stopped. Still, some days a sudden fear darts
through me, whether it’s my own city street
I hurry across, or at a corner in an unknown
town: the high, vacant air arrests me—where’s home?

 

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©1995 by Kathy Mangan, from her most recent book of poems, Above the Tree Line, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995. Reprinted by permission of Kathy Mangan and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

 

To Let You Pass

Remembering Craig Arnold.

By Christian Wiman
Poetry Media Service

It is now seven months since Craig Arnold died—or vanished, as most notices have termed it. We have delayed running an obituary for him partly because of the circumstances of his death. As most people in the poetry world now know, he disappeared while exploring a volcano on a Japanese island, and all indications are that he suffered a fatal fall in such a remote and dense location that his body may never be found. Another part of the delay, though, perhaps the better part of it, is this: I knew Craig, and knew him to be a person in whom life burned so intensely and immediately that not only is his death at 41 a shock, but in some part of my brain it simply will not register.

I first met Craig about 10 years ago at a little college in Virginia, where he was part of a symposium of young poets I had organized. Tall, lean, and with his head shaved, clad in black leather pants and tight white T-shirt, he didn’t “read” his poems: he performed them, strutting elastically about as if he were on stage, whipsawing lines and limbs in precise, rehearsed ways, electrifying that quaint little lecture hall as if it were the Moulin Rouge. I tend to be allergic to this kind of self-dramatization in poetry, but I loved it. All of it: the flair that seemed to arise naturally out of his character rather than being appliquéd on; the mercurial and protean nature of his subjects (and, I would learn, his own life); the hell-bent hungers and raptures kept in check—or at least kept intact, intelligible—by the tough-minded conscience and craft that ran through the poems like a spine.

Those were the poems of Shells, Craig’s first book, which had been selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1998 (published in 1999). The poems hold up, to say the least. In fact, what strikes me when reading them now is how little they need any embellishment of drama or gesture, how absolute their integrity is on the page. “Hot,” a long, tightly wrought narrative that is emblematic of the book as a whole, is about—besides life and death and art, I mean—two friends who share a passion, of a sort, for ever-hotter peppers:

I called in sick
next morning, said I’d like to take

time off. She thinks I’ve hit the bottle.
The high those peppers gave me is more subtle—

I’m lucid, I remember my full name,
my parents’ birthdays, how to win a game

of chess in seven moves, why which and that
mean different things. But what we eat,

why, what it means, it’s all been explained
—Take this curry, this fine-tuned

balance of humors, coconut liquor thinned
by broth, sour pulp of tamarind

cut through by salt, set off by fragrant
galangal, ginger, basil, cilantro, mint,

the warp and woof of texture, aubergines
that barely hold their shape, snap beans

heaped on jasmine, basmati rice
—it’s a lie, all of it—pretext—artifice

—ornament—sugar-coating—for . . .

For what? Well, that’s the whole heart of “Hot,” the whole heart of Craig, really, who seems to me as powerfully present in these poems as when I first heard him perform them all those years ago—and as teasingly elusive.

Nine years would pass between the publication of Shells and the appearance of Craig’s next book, Made Flesh, nine years in which Craig lived in Rome and Bogotá and Wyoming and Utah and I don’t know where else. It was in some ways the typical 21st-century up-and-coming American poet’s life—the pickup jobs and the scramble for publishers, the fellowships and relationships (for the past six years of his life, Craig was very happily partnered with another poet, Rebecca Lindenberg), the constant effort to find a way of staying alive without allowing one’s lifeblood to congeal into a career.

And yet it wasn’t so typical, too: Craig was perhaps the only poet I have known personally—the only good poet, I should say—who seemed completely at ease with being a poet. Don’t get me wrong: Craig had all of the existential friction and psychic disquiet we’ve come to expect from post-Romantic poets—an excess of it, actually. You don’t have to read his poems autobiographically—and they’re too cunningly, winningly imagined to do that—to get a hint of the tempest that was their source. But he also had, right down to his soul (I guess it was his soul), a calm and clarifying equanimity about his purpose on this earth, and always over the years when I would encounter him—a few days in Virginia again, a dinner in San Francisco, a breakfast in Chicago—I would discover my own bristling insecurities melting away in his presence, and would feel my own relationship with poetry renewed. This wasn’t because Craig had achieved some sort of monkish calm with regard to ambition (ha!), and it certainly wasn’t because he was placidly and brainlessly open to everything he encountered (in fact, he could be quite sudden and sharp in his opinions). No, what Craig had, besides his endless and endlessly inclusive charisma, was a capacity to be at once absolutely grounded in the physical world, and in his own body, and yet utterly, mysteriously permeable. I’m not sure how this played out in his daily life, but I know it affected mine, and for the better. I also know that this quality gives the concrete things of his poetry, and especially his later poetry, a powerful sense of being more themselves by being more than themselves:

Here is a small café
opening for breakfast
a zinc counter catching the light
at every angle in bright rings of glitter
A cup of black coffee is placed before you
brimming with rainbow-colored foam
a packet of sugar   a pat of butter
a split roll of bread
scored and toasted and still warm
The butter is just soft enough to spread
the coffee hot and sugared to perfect sweetness
the bread grilled to the palest brown
crisp but not quite dry
You tear it neatly into pieces
eat them slowly    when you finish
you are exactly full

Here are bread butter and coffee
Here you are     your own body
eating and drinking what you are given
as one day you in turn will be devoured
and that is all     You were never the lord
of a lightless kingdom     any more
than she has ever been its queen
and the world you talked into a prison
suddenly seems to be made of glass
and your eyes see clear to the horizon
and you feel the molecules of air
part like a curtain     as if to let you pass
—From “Couple From Hell”

This is from Made Flesh, which is a different sort of book from Shells. Shells is often about the immediacy of experience, but there is just as often a detachment to the poems, a very palpable (and altogether successful) sense of artifice, of talent that is in some way distancing a world even as it brings that world wildly alive. In Made Flesh that distance is gone. The language is sparer, all irony is obliterated, the poems are less obviously “formal,” and their raptures are at once quieter and more complete. There is something both precise and encompassing about these poems, something at the same time piercing and liberating. Time abrades talent. Some poets don’t seem to notice this and continue to make the same ever-thinning sound right on into oblivion. Others lapse into embittered silence. In some, though, the abrasions bloom:

On the fire escape of your rented room
we sat and felt the empty city
sweat and fret     we passed a cigarette
back and forth     as once we passed
words like these between us      without
hope of keeping
Now I write
without hope of answer     to say
that what we gave each other nakedly
was too much and not enough
To say that since we last touched
I am not empty     I hear you named
and my heart starts     the pieces of your voice
you left     are interleaved with mine

and to this quick spark in the emptiness
to say Yes     I miss how love
may make us otherwise
—From “Asunder”

The bracing, rule-breaking (show, then tell), completely convincing move from detail to abstraction, from sensation to realization; the space-ghosted form of the lines so apt for their subject; the careful, graceful assurance of the poem as it charts an entirely new route through a minefield of emotional and poetic clichés: it takes an enormous amount of skill to speak one’s pain in this way, and it takes a rare, clear heart.

I last saw Craig back in February, when he came into town for the AWP conference. He showed up at the Poetry offices one afternoon and practically lifted me off the floor in a hug. As always, the twitchy intelligence, the solar flares of his energy, surprised me—and, as always, surprised a happiness in me I hadn’t known was there. We locked him in an office all afternoon in hopes that he would write the long-overdue prose note to the translation he had done for our April issue, and for hours he sat there (weird: how suddenly still he could become, how creaturely focused), finally emerging near dusk with a single brilliant and self-revealing page on a poet he had recently met while living in Colombia (“to hit upon such an image requires an intimate acquaintance with all the flavors of pain and persistence and hopelessness—here, I thought, was a conscience to reckon with”). The next day he led—with great kindness, and much to my surprise—a reading he’d shaped as a celebration of the magazine. He’d given up the extravagant reading style of years before because, he said, he began to think it was actually deflecting people’s attention and detracting from the work. Still, even understated (as if that word could ever be used for Craig!), he was searing, mesmerizing, unforgettable.

Craig stayed with my wife and me that week, and somehow in between the dozens of friends he was seeing, or tending to, or shuttling to and from the airport, we found time to talk. I remember most clearly his last morning here, when he made us migas for breakfast, and the conversation turned to something he and I had talked of many times over the years: the necessary but destabilizing intensities of poetry, and the life that one risks by cultivating those intensities, and the life that—in some cases, our cases, we both felt—poetry also rescues. Out in the front yard he gave me another of his no-holds-barred hugs and promised to be back in August. Only as he drove off did I realize I’d forgotten to get him to sign our copy of Made Flesh, which is a shame, since the inscription he wrote for me on Shells all those years ago is a gem. Filling the entire page, and linking quotations from Fight Club and Baudelaire with a self-consciously absurd smiley face, it’s Craig all over. “I hope this stays with you,” he scrawled on the very last bit of space at the end of the page. “I certainly will.”

Christian Wiman is the author of three books, most recently Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. A new book of poetry, Every Riven Thing, is forthcoming in 2011. He has edited Poetry magazine since 2003. This essay originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Christian Wiman. All rights reserved.

Interview With a Poet: Wayne Miller

I was one of the last people to arrive for Wayne Miller’s morning presentation at last month’s South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood. He hadn’t started reading yet, and looking back, I’m glad I didn’t miss a minute of his presentation. His poems live well on the page, but as is so often the case, hearing the poet read his own work adds a dimension of emotion that otherwise does not resonate.

After his reading in Deadwood, Miller asked me if I knew where he could get a good breakfast in Deadwood. But being not so familiar with the town, I couldn’t give him any advice. Later, I overheard him telling another one of the festival poets how dreadful his hotel breakfast was. Sorry, Wayne. Deadwood’s just not a real breakfasty sort of place.

Had I read Miller’s “The Book of Props,” though, I would have tried much harder to make sure he got a decent meal. Anyway, Miller’s bio:

Wayne Miller is the author of two collections of poems, The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009) and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006), which received the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He is also translator of Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2007) and editor (with Kevin Prufer and 22 regional editors) of New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). The recipient of the George Bogin Award, the Lucille Medwick Award (in 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2009), and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from the Poetry Foundation, Miller lives in Kansas City and teaches as the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

AFTER LONG BUSYNESS: Who do you consider to be the biggest influences on your poetry?

WAYNE MILLER: Like most writers, I’m pretty much continually reading, and what I read affects what I write. Which is to say that, at different moments in my writing life, different poets have been important to me.

The first poet whose work I really fell in love with—back in what I believe was my sophomore year of college—was James Wright. I’d read poetry before; in fact, I’d had an excellent high school teacher in Cincinnati who’d brought contemporary poetry into the classroom, and I owned a copy of Leaves of Grass. My dad was an English professor, and I remember flipping around in his collected William Carlos Williams when I visited him.

But James Wright opened up doors for me. He was writing about Ohio, where I was from, in ways that made the Midwestern landscape feel charged with poetic possibility. And his work was deeply affected by contact with the works of non-American poets such as Lorca, Vallejo, Rilke and Trakl—something that, ironically, allowed him to write more directly and effectively about the American landscape.

Partially inspired by Wright, and aided by the fact that I attended Oberlin College, where all the poetry professors were also translators, I found myself very early on reading non-English language poets in translation—and it was then that I first discovered Rainer Maria Rilke, whose work (though I still can only read it in translation) has been perhaps the most enduringly important to me of any poet’s.

The other poet I go back to more than any other is Wallace Stevens, whose sense of music and rhythm is extraordinary and who, like Rilke, is interested in (among other things) the phenomenological complications of our experience of the physical world.

At this point, I feel compelled to list off the names of all the other poets I admire—whose work I go back to at least semi-regularly. But rather than miss folks and feel guilty later, perhaps I should end my answer there.

ALB: How much revision do your poems usually go through?

WM: I know some poets whose first drafts emerge pretty close to the poems’ finished versions, but I’m definitely not one of them. When my first book, Only the Senses Sleep, came out, a student of mine asked how much I’d had to revise the poems in it, so I went back through my drafts and looked at when the poems began, when I published them in magazines, and when they arrived at their final, in-the-book versions (which sometimes included significant revision after magazine publication). There wasn’t one poem in the book I’d worked on for less than six months—and many of them I’d worked on for several years.

Of course, that was also my first book. In the room of every new poem, I find myself stumbling around in the dark, but in those early poems the rooms were often pitch black. I’m a more experienced poet now, and though I still do quite a lot of revision, it’s somewhat more rare that my poems need the truly radical revisions that my earlier poems often did. These days I tend to spend several months off-and-on-again revising.

ALB: Your most recent collection, “The Book of Props,” has a sequence of 23 poems called “What the Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse),” which sketches out a screenplay for a film. How did you arrive at the idea of using a screenplay as a device to frame your poems?

WM: “What Night Says to the Empty Boat” began with a couple drafty lyric poems that were failing because they were too sentimental and/or could too easily be read as autobiographical. In each of them, I found myself wanting to distance the speaker from the emotional content, so I switched from first to third person. But then I found that a random “he” in a poem didn’t seem particularly distanced—a reader could quite easily still read that “he” as me. So I switched one of the poems to “she.”

At that point, I thought, hmm, what if those “he’s” and that “she” know each other; in other words, what if they’re characters.

Then I decided that if pronouns without antecedents are annoying in prose, they’re probably at least as annoying in poetry (T.S Eliot notwithstanding), so I gave them names—based loosely on three particular people I knew.

I’d also, at the time, been trying (miserably) to write some fiction, and I think the resulting interest in narrative and character propelled my desire to allow a background storyline to accrue across these poems. I liked the visual, image-based nature of film, but I didn’t want to have a full “film in verse,” because that would require me to construct a complete narrative, and I was much more interested in the poems being lyrics. So “notes for a film” seemed to make sense—it further distanced those early failing poems and, in the process, added a fourth character—the filmmaker talking to himself about the film he envisions making.

At this point I think I had four or five poems. Then summer hit and I moved back to Houston to live with my girlfriend, who’d been there finishing up school while I’d been in Missouri in my first year of teaching.

That summer, when she left for work each day I found myself alone in her cramped apartment, with my laptop, little money and nothing to do—in a kind of limbo between my life in Missouri and my former life in Houston. Writing into a developing sequence seemed a perfectly good way to spend my time—which meant I gave myself more leeway to “play around” than I otherwise might have. And the experience of being reunited with my girlfriend after a year apart colored the overall themes and content of the sequence. In my mind, it’s all really one big love poem.

ALB: I assume that, as an editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, you spend a good amount of time reading poetry by a wide range of poets. How is the state of the art these days?

WM: Every six months, it seems, someone or other is decrying some aspect of the state of contemporary poetry—whether it’s John Barr, Ron Silliman, or someone in between. From my Stylite’s perch atop the Pleiades slush pile, however, the state of poetry looks pretty good; the best work showing up in our mailbox is consistently varied and strong.

There was a time in the mid-1980s when what seemed to matter most about much of the poetry that was being published was that it was TRUE—that an uncle really had been mean to the poet, or that the poet’s grandmother really had been dying, or that the poet really did feel bad about failing as a parent, or that the poet really had fought off cancer. Form seemed less important than content, in other words, and content seemed primarily ad misericordium.

In the mid-1990s, a lot of interesting poets started resisting that baldly autobiographical impulse, and many of the poetic strains getting press these days are various versions of that pushback against post-confessionalism. For example, we have Steven Burt’s injection of confessionalism with aspects of Language poetics (“elliptical” poetry), a return to the Objectivists (what Burt calls the “new thing”) and other Modernists, a renewed interest in the New York School poets, neoformalism, a focus on personas and dramatic monologues (e.g., Maurice Manning and my colleague Kevin Prufer), a turn toward European surrealism and/or classicism, etc.

In my mind, all these diverse approaches to keeping form and content, technique and raw emotion, in balance are good for the art. And Pleiades has pretty consistently received—and enjoyed receiving—the work of many good poets mining these various aesthetic veins.

American Life in Poetry: Column 241

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I love poems in which the central metaphors are fresh and original, and here’s a marvelous, coiny description of autumn by Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck, who lives in Illinois.

Like Coins, November

We drove past late fall fields as flat and cold
as sheets of tin and, in the distance, trees

were tossed like coins against the sky. Stunned gold
and bronze, oaks, maples stood in twos and threes:

some copper bright, a few dull brown and, now
and then, the shock of one so steeled with frost

it glittered like a dime. The autumn boughs
and blackened branches wore a somber gloss

that whispered tails to me, not heads. I read
memorial columns in their trunks; their leaves

spelled UNUM, cent; and yours, the only head . . .
in penny profile, Lincoln-like (one sleeve,

one eye) but even it was turning tails
as russet leaves lay spent across the trails.

 

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck. Reprinted from The Spoon River Poetry Review, Vol. XXXIII, no. 1, 2008, by permission of Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck and the publisher. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

 

Poetry, Daily

Brenda Starr makes way for Rumi, Neruda, and Merwin.

By Mary Schmich
Poetry Media Service

I write a news column at the Chicago Tribune, and at the beginning of baseball season this year one of my editors phoned with a tough assignment, something, he said, that called for special skills.

Was I being asked to investigate a doping scandal? conduct an exclusive interview? throw out the first pitch?

“Can you write us a poem about opening day?” he asked.

He and I both knew that by “poem” he meant doggerel—silly verse written with a wink—and I obliged:

Yes, baseball’s back, at last, at last
To bat away the blues
The games arrive like sunshine
In the bleepin’ gloomy news.

Blagojevich indicted!
The economy’s a mess!
Plus parking, potholes, crooks and crimes!
We need some anti-stress!
—From An Ode to Opening Day

It ran on the front page, embroidered with old-fashioned bunting that signaled that rhyming verse, like baseball itself, was a relic of a quainter time.

I’ve always felt slightly sheepish about the pleasure I get from my occasional forays into doggerel. The enjoyment some columnists get from their political fulminations, I get from rhyming “spinach” and “Kucinich.”

I feel only slightly less sheepish about how often I exploit the poems of real poets to make a serious point. Poetry and journalism are like peanut butter and baloney: coupling them is not to everyone’s taste.

But I can’t help myself. Poetry isn’t just a way of writing, it’s a way of thinking, and I’ve been thinking that way since at least sixth grade.

At Alexander School IV in Macon, Georgia, Miss Lois Birch, who seemed as old as God, made us memorize poems. The two I remember spring to mind as often as the faces of old friends. I keep them in my head the way you might keep worry beads in your pocket, reaching reflexively in times of stress for their meaning, rhythm, sound.

One is by John Masefield: “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” The other is by William Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils.

Whenever I can, I sneak poems into my newspaper column.

After terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, I instinctively flipped through my most dog-eared book of poems, Wislawa Szymborska’s View with a Grain of Sand, and plucked a few verses from “Hatred”:

See how efficient it still is,
how it keeps itself in shape—
our century’s hatred.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.

Her poem gave my prose a power it wouldn’t otherwise have had.

When W.S. Merwin won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, I used the occasion as an excuse to quote from “Rain Light,” about a mother’s death. I put a link to the entire poem in my column, and hundreds of readers sought it out.

I’ve bolstered my own summer musings with Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” whose last line electrocutes me every time I read it: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

In autumn, I’ve quoted from Pablo Neruda’s “October Fullness,” though it’s about October as a time of life more than a time of year:

Little by little, and also in great leaps,
life happened to me,
and how insignificant this business is.

The response to the columns in which I quote good poems is always strong, which is another reason to feel sheepish: even with full attribution, I’m reaping credit for someone else’s genius.

Poetry also creeps into Brenda Starr, the soap-opera comic strip I’ve written for 24 years. Our heroine, Brenda, quotes poetry and muses on it. Heroes and villains alike use it to woo her.

Recently, a mysterious, dashing man named Ringo, from the fictitious country of Kazookistan, dazzled her with verse:

Ringo didn’t conquer Brenda, but he did seduce many comics readers who were grateful to discover Rumi and Hafiz.

Newspaper columns, comic strips, and poems may not seem like related literary forms, but they’re less different than they look. In their own ways, each of them seeks the same thing: to make meaning in a space whose power lies in always being just a little too short.

Mary Schmich is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and writes the Brenda Starr comic strip. This essay first appeared in the September 2009 issue of Poetry magazine and is available at www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

© 2009 by Mary Schmich. All rights reserved.

American Life in Poetry: Column 240

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

We haven’t shown you many poems in which the poet enters another person and speaks through him or her, but it is, of course, an effective and respected way of writing. Here Philip Memmer of Deansboro, N.Y., enters the persona of a young woman having an unpleasant experience with a blind date.

The Paleontologist’s Blind Date

You have such lovely bones, he says,
holding my face in his hands,

and although I can almost feel
the stone and the sand

sifting away, his fingers
like the softest of brushes,

I realize after this touch
he would know me

years from now, even
in the dark, even

without my skin.
Thank you, I smile—

then I close the door
and never call him again.

 

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Philip Memmer, whose most recent book of poetry is Lucifer: A Hagiography, Lost Horse Press, 2009. Poem reprinted from Threat of Pleasure, Word Press, 2008, by permission of Philip Memmer and the publisher. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.