Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...gist-movement/

POETRY NEWS
Newly Translated Letter From Ezra Pound Clarifies Imagist Movement
BY HARRIET STAFF

Jared Spears presents and dissects a heretofore untranslated 1928 letter from Ezra Pound to French scholar and critic René Taupin:
The letter was prompted by Taupin’s analysis of Imagism, the avant-garde movement Pound, an American expatriate, had helped found in London after the dawn of the new century. Taupin, then chairman of romance languages at Hunter College, asserted that Imagism was almost inseparable from earlier French Symbolists (an argument which would culminate in his 1929 book, The Influence of French Symbolism on Modern American Poetry). For Pound, Taupin’s assertions belittled what he believed to be the unique accomplishments of his own literary movement.
More from Jacket2:
Pound’s letter to Taupin serves as his rebuttal. Due to Pound’s scattered, almost stream-of-conscious writing style, passages of the letter are dissected here to better follow his logic, beginning with his opening:
Of course, if you permit an inversion of time, in some Einsteinian relativity, it would seem likely to you that I’d received the idea of the image from the poems of Hilda Doolittle, written after that idea was received. See the dates of the various books.
To lay the base for his argument, Pound painstakingly makes a case for a less direct influence on Imagism from modern French writers, asserting that he and his cohorts arrived at their conclusions more or less independently. He describes trademarks of his own style as “[v]ery severe self-examination  —  and intolerance for all the mistakes and stupidities of French poets.”
Pound goes on to trace the general flow of poetic innovation from French writers of the late nineteenth century through Symons, Baudelaire, and Verlaine. “Certainly progress in the poetic technique,” he admits. But it is from Arthur Rimbaud that Pound traced the origin of modernist writing, a fact in general consensus today.
That which Rimbaud reached by intuition (genius) in some poems, created via (perhaps?) conscious aesthetic  —  I do not want to ascribe him any unjust achievement  —  but for all that I know. I’m doing an aesthetic more or less systematic  —  and could have named certain poems of Rimbaud as example. (Yet also some poems of Catullus.)
And it is certain that apart from some methods of expression  —  Rimbaud and I have but a point of resemblance. But almost all of the experimentation, poetic technique of 1830-up to me  —  was made in France.
Experimentation perhaps, but not progress, continues Pound in signature frankness.
Find the full essay and the letter here. Check out the initial publication, in its original French, in Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–1941 (New Directions 1971).
Tags: Ezra Pound, Jacket2, Jared Spears, New Directions
Posted in Poetry News on Wednesday, July 1st, 2015 by Harriet Staff

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://mikechasar.blogspot.com

ABOUT ME

My Photo
MIKE CHASAR
SALEM, OREGON, UNITED STATES
Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War
VIEW MY COMPLETE PROFILE

Praise for Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America

"Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

"Burma-Shave quatrains, newspaper columns, scrapbooks with thousands of stanzas held together by affection and paste, folksy, pseudonymous, nationally famous radio hosts and the fans who sent them an avalanche of homemade verse: these are just some of the materials taken seriously in Mike Chasar’s extraordinarily memorable, and likely influential, study of popular American verse, and of the popular culture that grew up around it, for most of the twentieth century. Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, to images, and to informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links Williams Carlos Williams’s innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the Hallmark card; he may change how you see some eminent writers’ work. Even more than that, however, Chasar should get twenty-first-century readers to sit up and notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry that they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode that Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/ HAS LOTS TO SAY/ IF YOU CAN READ IT/ CHASAR’S WAY. His book is an ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies; it’s also a surprise, and a delight." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

"As Bob Dylan put it, 'We have our ideas about poets,' and we certainly have our ideas about poetry. Lately, those ideas have led to a national outcry in favor of bringing poetry back into American public life. But in Everyday Reading, Mike Chasar shows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important—really, a necessary—book for anyone interested in modern poetics, in the history of reading, in the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance." — Virginia Jackson, University of California Irvine, author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

"This breakthrough study convincingly shows that American poetry in the opening decades of the twentieth century, far from being a largely elitist product that appealed to a limited audience, circulated among a number of different readers to a remarkable degree and left its traces in surprising areas." — Edward Brunner, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Cold War Poetry



"The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness—this is what Mike Chasar ... has shown in his book Everyday Reading" — Marina Zagidullina, New Literary Observer

•

"[T]he originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading." — Lisa Steinman, The Journal of American History

•

"[The] tension between the poetic and the popular is the crux of Chasar's fun and thoughtful book. Chasar is a literary archaeologist. He excavates the poetry in Burma Shave ads, literary scrapbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, old time radio shows, and yes, even Hallmark cards. His close reading of [Paul] Engle's poem 'Easter' as well as the reproduction of the actual card is genius. His thesis is that early-twentieth-century market culture was saturated with poetry (as opposed to 'Poetry') that was participatory rather than exclusionary. This emotional interactivity with poetry, Chasar posits, set the stage for the bizarre matrix of media, commerce, and culture that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century." — Dean Rader, American Literature

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://edwardcolettispoetryblog.blogspot.com

(Ed Coletti's) NO MONEY IN POETRY
"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either." -- Robert Graves
This is sort of an online portfolio occasionally featuring a few samples of both my work
and that of others. Please also consider looking at
Ed Coletti's P3 (edcolettip3.blogspot.com) for philosopy, politics, and also some poetry.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Codrescu Word Shakers NPR Special/Poets and Ego/Robert Creeley and Robert Creeley Reading/


Ain't no money in poetry
That's what sets the poet free
I've had all the freedom I can stand
Cold dog soup and rainbow pie
Is all it takes to get me by
Fool my belly till the day I die
Cold dog soup and rainbow pie
--- from Cold Dog Soup by Guy Clark

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google
account, then log in by checking "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name
(don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like.
Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.
Poets And Ego (Part 1)

About a month ago, I put the word out that I was looking for ideas about "poets and ego."
The replies I received were thoughtful and interesting. Many responded with well-considered
ideas about how the poet does or does not utilize the first person in their poems. For example,
Carlo Parcelli wrote that

All I can say is that I have always shunned the personal 'I' in my poetry except as 'persona'
for basically one reason. Not using it made me think and write in ways where I was not necessarily
the generative element, the psychic haven, if that makes any sense. Material as it appeared and
accrued played off other elements in the poem, not me.
Because my original idea had been to look at personality and behavioral aspects of poets, I
clarified my request like this,


Wondering why I do what I do? Why I paint? Why I publish books? Why I attend readings? Why I
send poems to and am published by journals? Why I'm aware of a certain competitiveness and self
promotion among poets? Why any of this matters? Why there are so many tempests in this tiny
little teapot whose very existence is known or understood by so few?
I was mindful of my own recent poem on this very subject,



Tea and Turmoil

Present universe requiring little,
she demands all things from herself,
“write poems, check Facebook. blog.
paint, create. Do it all before you die,
So little time to breathe, smile, feel.
So much to be before being itself is
no more, and nonbeing is or isn’t. So
why do much of anything requiring
planning, plans at which the gods
laugh and at such mortal fools
falling over each other boiling
like her in her little teapot —
so many kettle storms
felt only in this one crucible
which she with others like her
inhabit unbeknownst to
occupants of all those infinite pots
brewing tea and turmoil and
signifying only babble boiling
invisibly, inevitably, unknown.

So I went to poets like the wonderful Pat Nolan who told me
it’s all ego, Ed, and poets are surfers on the ego wave – gnarly
Ed, there may be a generation blindness. Oldsters not being able to see or have access to the great young talent, and youngsters too busy with themselves to discover the contemporary masters. There are hidden treasures, from Apollinaire to Whalen, that have been bypassed or ignored. It takes the diligence of a scholar to discover them. I don’t see many young poets taking that route.
To by original request for books on the subject, Copper Canyon Founder Sam Hamill replied,

Do I know of anything in print about poets egos? No. But 40 years as editor and friend to poets, I know many are out of control.

Clark County Washington Poet Laureate Christoper Luna gives us a comprehensive answer,


OK, Ed. I look at this way. A writer is one who is compelled to write. It does not necessarily follow that he/she must share it with the world. However, if one has something to say that means something, why not share it? And if what you're writing doesn't mean anything to you, why bother writing in the first place? Sharing the work publicly does involve some ego, but it need not be of the competitive, crush everything in its path variety. My model is Ginsberg, a Buddhist who also had an enormous ego and was a great promoter of himself and others. It is a kind of paradox, but poets grok negative capability, right?

I don't believe that we create in a vacuum. It is good for humans to meet, gather, and exchange ideas with one another. Getting up to read a poem at an open mic or featured reading does not automatically make one an egotistical asshole. That part is up to them. I do believe that we can do this work with humility and a sense of service to the community. I believe Ginsberg had a handle on poetry as a public service and a spiritual practice. If the work means something, then merely sharing it will help others.
Harsh as it may sound, my feeling is that if a writer doesn't believe that the work has the power to change the world, they should do anything else. There are plenty of others who take it seriously, and as you know, there's no money in it.
I find Sonoma County former poet laureate Bill Vartnaw characteristically public-spirited on the subject,

I don't know of a book. My own thoughts: I think "service." Service to poetry, other poets, other causes. For balance. I'm sure you do all this, but that's what I do. Poets need ego because we can be quick change artists and can get it utterly wrong; ego, besides making us think we're idiots when we're down, helps pull us out of the funk, but when we are on a roll, we need service. Hope this helps. . .

Given the subject, I hope I'm not being an enabler, or, if I am, am doing so modestly. This is also an invite to read at the Petaluma Poetry Walk. I don't know what venue yet. We're asking and seeing who can make it first. It's on September 20th. Do you want to read?
Well, of course I do, Bill! I hope these contributions are useful. In the next edition of NMIP, I will do a Part 2 on "Poets and Ego" and will incorporate more of the responses about the poem itself, particularly how poets see the role of themselves in the poem.
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Edit---

OK, Ed. I look at this way. A writer is one who is compelled to write. It does not necessarily
follow that he/she must share it with the world. However, if one has something to say that means
something, why not share it? And if what you're writing doesn't mean
anything to you, why bother writing in the first place? Sharing the work publicly does involve
some ego, but it need not be of the competitive, crush everything in its path variety. My model
is Ginsberg, a Buddhist who also had an enormous ego and was a great promoter of himself and
others. It is a kind of paradox, but poets grok negative capability, right?

I don't believe that we create in a vacuum. It is good for humans to meet, gather, and exchange
ideas with one another. Getting up to read a poem at an open mic or featured reading does not
automatically make one an egotistical asshole. That part is up to them. I do believe that we
can do this work with humility and a sense of service to the community. I believe Ginsberg had
a handle on poetry as a public service and a spiritual practice. If the work means something,
then merely sharing it will help others.
Harsh as it may sound, my feeling is that if a writer doesn't believe that the work has the power
to change the world, they should do anything else. There are plenty of others who take it
seriously, and as you know, there's no money in it.

^^^^^^^^^^^-- This pretty much sums up my view on potery as well.
Idealist, maybe- but why write if not serious-why write if not to eventually share?
And why write poetry if not to be giving of ones self?--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/175809

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer
BY MARY KARR
To confess my unlikely Catholicism in Poetry—a journal founded in part on and for the godless, twentieth-century disillusionaries of J. Alfred Prufrock and his pals—feels like an act of perversion kinkier than any dildo-wielding dominatrix could manage on HBO’s “Real Sex Extra.” I can’t even blame it on my being a cradle Catholic, some brainwashed escapee of the pleated skirt and communion veil who—after a misspent youth and facing an Eleanor Rigby-like dotage—plodded back into the confession booth some rainy Saturday.

Not victim but volunteer, I converted in 1996 after a lifetime of undiluted agnosticism. Hearing about my baptism, a pal sent me a postcard that read, “Not you on the Pope’s team. Say it ain’t so!” Well, while probably not the late Pope’s favorite Catholic (nor he my favorite pope), I took the blessing and ate the broken bread. And just as I continue to live in America and vote despite my revulsion for many US policies, I continue to enjoy the sacraments despite my fervent aversion to certain doctrines. Call me a cafeteria Catholic if you like, but to that I’d say, Who isn’t?

Perversely enough, the request for this confession showed up last winter during one of my lowest spiritual gullies. A blizzard’s dive-bombing winds had kept all the bodegas locked for the second day running (thus depriving New Yorkers of newspapers and orange juice), and I found—in my otherwise bare mailbox—a letter asking me to write about my allegedly deep and abiding faith. That very morning, I’d confessed to my spiritual advisor that while I still believed in God, he had come to seem like Miles Davis, some nasty genius scowling out from under his hat, scornful of my mere being and on the verge of waving me off the stage for the crap job I was doing. The late William Matthews has a great line about Mingus, who “flurried” a musician from the stand by saying, “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel...” I felt doomed to be that diminuendo, an erasure mark that matched the erasure mark I saw in the grayed-out heavens.

Any attempt at prayer in this state is a slow spin on a hot spit, but poetry is still healing balm, partly because it’s always helped me feel less alone, even in earliest childhood. Poets were my first priests, and poetry itself my first altar. It was a lot of other firsts too, of course: first classroom/chat room/confessional. But it was most crucially the first source of awe for me, because it eased a nagging isolation: it was a line thrown to my drear-minded self from seemingly glorious Others.

From a very early age, when I read a poem, it was as if the poet’s burning taper touched some charred filament in my rib cage to set me alight. Somehow—long before I’d published—that connection even extended from me outward. Lifting my face from the page, I often faced my fellow creatures with less dread. Maybe secreted in one of them was an ache or tenderness similar to the one I’d just eaten of. As that conduit into a community, poetry never failed me, even if the poet reaching me was some poor wretch even more abject than myself. Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its mojo was a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for those more gullible believers in my midst—dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.

In the Texas oil town where I grew up, fierceness won fights, but I was thin-skinned—an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn’t seem to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids. Plus, early on, I twigged to the fact that my clan differed from our neighbors. Partly because of my family’s entrenched atheism, kids weren’t allowed to enter my yard—also since my artist mother was known to paint “nekked” women and guzzle vodka straight out of the bottle. She was seductive and mercurial and given to deep doldrums and mysterious vanishings, and I sought nothing so much as her favor. Poetry was my first lure. Even as a preschooler, I could sometimes draw her out of a sulk by reciting the works of e.e. cummings and A.A. Milne.

In my godless household, poems were the only prayers that got said—the closest thing to sacred speech at all. I remember mother bringing me Eliot’s poems from the library, and she not only swooned over them, she swooned over my swooning over them, which felt as close as she came to swooning over me. Even my large-breasted and socially adroit older sister got Eliot—though Lecia warned me off telling kids at school that I read that kind of stuff. At about age twelve, I remember sitting on our flowered bedspread reading him to Lecia while she primped for a date. Read it again, the whole thing. She was a fourteen-year-old leaning into the mirror with a Maybelline wand, saying, Goddamn that’s great...Poetry was the family’s religion. Beauty bonded us.

Church language works that way among believers, I would wager—whether prayer or hymn. Uttering the same noises in unison is part of what consolidates a congregation (along with shared rituals like baptisms and weddings, which are mostly words). Like poetry, prayer often begins in torment, until the intensity of language forges a shape worthy of both labels: “true” and “beautiful.” (Only in my deepest prayers does language evaporate, and a wide and wordless silence takes over.) But if you’re in a frame of mind dark enough to refuse prayer, nothing can ease the ache like a dark poem. Wrestling with gnarled or engrossing language may not bring peace per se, but it can occupy a brain pumping out bad news like ticker tape and thus bring you back to the alleged rationality associated with the human phylum.

So it was for me last winter—my most recent dark night of the soul—when my faith got sandblasted away for some weeks. Part of this was due to circumstances. Right after a move to New York, fortune delivered a triple whammy: my kid off to college, a live-in love ending volcanically, then medical maladies that kept me laid up for weeks alone. In a state of scalding hurt—sleepless and unable to conjure hope at some future prospects—suddenly (it felt sudden, as if a pall descended over me one day) God seemed vaporous as any perfume.

To kneel and pray in this state is almost physically painful. At best, it’s like talking into a bucket. At worst, you feel like a chump, some heartsick fool still sending valentines to a cad. With my friends away for the holidays, poetry seemed my only solace for more than a month. Maybe a few times I dipped into the Psalms or the book of Job. But more often I bent over the “terrible sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins to find shape for my desolation:

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Self yeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.


I was also reading that bleak scribbler Bill Knott, to find a bitter companion to sip my own gall with. He’d aptly captured my spiritual state in “Brighton Rock by Graham Greene,” where he imagines a sequel for Greene’s book: the offspring that criminal sociopath Pinky Brown conceived in the body of pitiful Rose Wilson before he died becomes a teenager in a skiffle band called Brighton Rockers. This kid’s inborn anguish resounds in the grotesque Mass his mom sits through:

Every Sunday now in church Rose slices

her ring-finger off, onto the collection-plate;
once the sextons have gathered enough
bodily parts from the congregation, enough

to add up to an entire being, the priest sub-
stitutes that entire being for the one
on the cross: they bring Him down in the name

of brown and rose and pink, sadness
and shame. His body, remade, is yelled at
and made to get a haircut, go to school,

study, to do each day like the rest
of us crawling through this igloo of hell
and laugh it up, show pain a good time,

and read Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.


This winter, I felt yelled at by the world at large and God in particular. The rhythm of Knott’s final sentence says it all—“to DO each DAY like the REST/of us”—the first phrase is a stair plod, with an extra stumble step to line’s end, where it becomes a cliff you fall off (no REST here)—“CRAWling through this IGloo of HELL.”

People usually (always?) come to church as they do to prayer and poetry—through suffering and terror. Need and fear. In some Edenic past, our ancestors began to evolve hard-wiring that actually requires us (so I believe) to make a noise beautiful enough to lay on the altar of the Creator/Rain God/Fertility Queen. With both prayer and poetry, we use elegance to exalt, but we also beg and grieve and tremble. We suffer with prayer and poetry alike. Boy, do we suffer.

The faithless contenders for prayer’s relief who sometimes ask me

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178489
ESSAY
For the Sake of People’s Poetry
Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.

BY JUNE JORDAN
In America, the father is white; it is he who inaugurated the experiment of this republic. It is he who sailed his way into slave ownership and who availed himself of my mother—that African woman whose function was miserable—defined by his desirings, or his rage. It is he who continues to dominate the destiny of the Mississippi River, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the life of my son. Understandably, then, I am curious about this man.

Most of the time my interest can be characterized as wary, at best. Other times, it is the interest a pedestrian feels for the fast traveling truck about to smash into him. Or her. Again. And at other times it is the curiosity of a stranger trying to figure out the system of the language that excludes her name and all of the names of all of her people. It is this last that leads me to the poet Walt Whitman.

Trying to understand the system responsible for every boring, inaccessible, irrelevant, derivative and pretentious poem that is glued to the marrow of required readings in American classrooms, or trying to understand the system responsible for the exclusion of every hilarious, amazing, visionary, pertinent and unforgettable poet from National Endowment of the Arts grants and from national publications, I come back to Walt Whitman.

What in the hell happened to him? Wasn’t he a white man? Wasn’t he some kind of a father to American literature? Didn’t he talk about this New World? Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he sing this New World, this America, on a New World, an American scale of his own visionary invention?

It so happens that Walt Whitman is the one white father who shares the systematic disadvantages of his heterogeneous offspring trapped inside a closet that is, in reality, as huge as the continental spread of North and South America. What Whitman envisioned, we, the people and the poets of the New World, embody. He has been punished for the moral questions that our very lives arouse.

At home as a child, I learned the poetry of the Bible and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. As a student, I diligently followed orthodox directions from The Canterbury Tales right through The Wasteland by that consummate Anglophile whose name I can never remember. And I kept waiting. It was, I thought, all right to deal with daffodils in the 17th century of an island as much like Manhattan as I resemble Queen Mary. But what about Dunbar? When was he coming up again? And where were the Black poets, altogether? And who were the women poets I might reasonably emulate? And wasn’t there, ever, a great poet who was crazy about Brooklyn or furious about war? And I kept waiting. And I kept writing my own poetry. And I kept reading apparently underground poetry: poetry kept strictly off campus. I kept reading the poetry of so many gifted students when I became a teacher. I kept listening to the wonderful poetry of the multiplying numbers of my friends who were and who are New World poets until I knew, for a fact, that there was and that there is an American, a New World poetry that is as personal, as public, as irresistible, as quick, as necessary, as unprecedented, as representative, as exalted, as speakably commonplace, and as musical as an emergency phone call.

But I didn’t know about Walt Whitman. Yes, I had heard about this bohemian, this homosexual, even, who wrote something about The Captain and The Lilacs in The Hallway, but nobody ever told me to read his work! Not only was Whitman not required reading, he was, on the contrary, presented as a rather hairy buffoon suffering from a childish proclivity for exercise and open air.

Nevertheless, it is through the study of the poems and the ideas of this particular white father that I have reached a tactical, if not strategic, understanding of the racist, sexist, and anti-American predicament that condemns most New World writing to peripheral/unpublished manuscript status.

Before these United States came into being, the great poets of the world earned their lustre through undeniable forms of spontaneous popularity; generations of a people chose to memorize and then to further elaborate these songs and to impart them to the next generation. I am talking about people; African families and Greek families and the families of the Hebrew tribes and all that multitude to whom the Bhagavad-Gita is as daily as the sun! If these poems were not always religious, they were certainly moral in notice, or in accomplishment, or both. None of these great poems would be mistaken for the poetry of another country, another time. You do not find a single helicopter taking off or landing in any of the sonnets of Elizabethan England, nor do you run across rice and peas in any of the psalms! Evidently, one criterion for great poetry used to be the requirements of cultural nationalism.

But by the advent of the thirty-six year old poet, Walt Whitman, the phenomenon of a people’s poetry, or great poetry and its spontaneous popularity, could no longer be assumed. The physical immensity and the farflung population of this New World decisively separated poets from suitable means to produce and distribute their poetry. Now there would have to be intermediaries—critics and publishers—whose marketplace principles of scarcity would, logically, oppose them to populist traditions of art.

Old World concepts would replace the democratic and these elitist notions would prevail; in the context of such considerations, an American literary establishment antithetical to the New World meanings of America took root. And this is one reason why the pre-eminently American white father of American poetry exists primarily in the realm of caricature and rumor in his own country.

As a matter of fact, if you hope to hear about Whitman your best bet is to leave home. Ignore prevailing American criticism and, instead, ask anybody anywhere else in the world this question: As Shakespeare is to England, Dante to Italy, Tolstoy to Russia, Goethe to Germany, Aghostino Neto to Angola, Pablo Neruda to Chile, Mao-Tse-Tung to China, and Ho Chi Minh to Vietnam, who is the great American writer, the distinctively American poet, the giant American “literatus?” Undoubtedly, the answer will be Walt Whitman.

He is the poet who wrote:
A man’s body at auction
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale.)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business. . .
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it. (1)
I ask you, today: Who in the United States would publish those lines? They are all wrong! In the first place there is nothing obscure, nothing contrived, nothing an ordinary strap-hanger in the subway would be puzzled by! In the second place, the voice of those lines is intimate and direct, at once; it is the voice of the poet who assumes that he speaks to an equal and that he need not fear that equality. On the contrary, the intimate distance between the poet and the reader is a distance that assumes there is everything important, between them, to be shared. And what is poetic about a line of words that runs as long as a regular, a spoken idea? You could more easily imagine an actual human being speaking such lines than you could imagine an artist composing them in a room carefully separated from the real life of his family. This can’t be poetry! Besides, these lines apparently serve an expressly moral purpose! Then is this didactic/political writing? Aha! This cannot be good poetry. And, in fact, you will never see, for example, The New Yorker Magazine publishing a poem marked by such splendid deficiencies.

Consider the inevitable, the irresistible, simplicity of that enormous moral idea:
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it . . .
This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers
in their turns
In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him count-
less immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments
Crucial and obviously important and, hence, this is not an idea generally broadcast: the poet is trying to save a human being while even the poem cannot be saved from the insolence of marketplace evaluation!

Indeed Whitman and the traceable descendants of Walt Whitman, those who follow his democratic faith into obviously New World forms of experience and art, they suffer from establishment rejection and contempt the same as forced this archetypal American genius to publish, distribute, and review his own work, by himself. The descendants I have in mind include those unmistakeably contemporaneous young poets who base themselves upon domesticities such as disco, Las Vegas, MacDonalds, and $40 running shoes. Also within the Whitman tradition, Black and First World* poets traceably transform and further the egalitarian sensibility that isolates that one white father from his more powerful compatriots. I am thinking of the feminist poets evidently intent upon speaking with a maximal number and diversity of other Americans' lives. I am thinking of all the many first rank heroes of the New World who are overwhelmingly forced to publish their own works using a hand press, or whatever, or else give it up entirely.

That is to say, the only peoples who can test or verify the meaning of the United States as a democratic state, as a pluralistic culture, these are the very peoples whose contribution to a national vision and discovery meets with steadfast ridicule and disregard.

A democratic state does not, after all, exist for the few, but for the many. A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak. And unless that many, that manifold constitution of diverse peoples can be seen as integral to the national art/the national consciousness, you might as well mean only Czechoslovakia when you talk about the USA, or only Ireland, or merely France, or exclusively white men.

Pablo Neruda is a New World poet whose fate differs from the other Whitman descendants because he was born into a country where the majority of the citizens did not mistake themselves for Englishmen or long to find themselves struggling, at most, with cucumber sandwiches and tea. He was never European. His anguish was not aroused by thee piece suits and rolled umbrellas. When he cries, towards the conclusion of The Heights of Machu Picchu, “Arise and birth with me, my brother,” (2) he plainly does not allude to Lord or Colonel Anybody At All. As he writes earlier, in that amazing poem:
I came by another way, river by river, street after street,
city by city, one bed and another,
forcing the salt of my mask through a wilderness;
and there, in the shame of the ultimate hovels, lampless
and tireless,
lacking bread or a stone or a stillness, alone in myself,
I whirled at my will, dying the death that was mine (3)
Of course Neruda has not escaped all of the untoward consequences common to Whitman descendants. American critics and translators never weary of asserting that Neruda is a quote great unquote poet despite the political commitment of his art and despite the artistic consequences of the commitment. Specifically, Neruda’s self-conscious decision to write in a manner readily comprehensible to the masses of his countrymen, and his self-conscious decision to specify, outright, the United Fruit Company when that was the instigating subject of his poem, become unfortunate moments in an otherwise supposedly sublime, not to mention surrealist, deeply Old World and European but nonetheless Chilean case history. To assure the validity of this perspective, the usual American critic and translator presents you with a smattering of the unfortunate, ostensibly political poetry and, on the other hand, buries you under volumes of Neruda’s early work that antedates the Spanish Civil War or, in other words, that antedates Neruda’s serious conversion to a political world view.

This kind of artistically indefensible censorship would have you perceive qualitative and even irreconcilable differences between the poet who wrote:
You, my antagonist, in that splintering dream
like the bristling glass of gardens, like a menace of ruinous bells, volleys
of blackening ivy at the perfume’s center,
enemy of the great hipbones my skin has touched
with a harrowing dew (4)
And the poet who wrote, some twenty years later, these lines from the poem entitled “The Dictators”:
Lament was perpetual and fell, like a plant and its pollen,
forcing a lightless increase in the blinded, big leaves
And bludgeon by bludgeon, on the terrible waters,
scale over scale in the bog,
the snout filled with silence and slime
and vendetta was born (5)
According to prevalent American criticism, that later poem of Neruda represents a lesser achievement precisely because it can be understood by more people, more easily, than the first. It is also derogated because this poem attacks a keystone of the Old World, namely dictatorship or, in other words, power and privilege for the few.

The peculiar North American vendetta against Walt Whitman, against the first son of this democratic union, can be further fathomed if you look at some facts: Neruda’s eminence is now acknowledged on international levels; it is known to encompass profound impact upon North American poets who do not realize the North American/Walt Whitman origins for so much that is singular and worthy in the poetry of Neruda. You will even find American critics who congratulate Neruda for overcoming the “Whitmanesque” content of his art. This perfidious arrogance is as calculated as it is common. You cannot persuade anyone seriously familiar with Neruda’s life and art that he could have found cause, at any point, to disagree with the tenets, the analysis and the authentic New World vision presented by Walt Whitman in his essay, Democratic Vistas, which remains the most signal and persuasive manifesto of New World thinking and belief in print.

Let me define my terms, in brief: New World does not mean New England. New World means non-European; it means new; it means big; it means heterogenous; it means unknown; it means free; it means an end to feudalism, caste, privilege, and the violence of power. It means wild in the sense that a tree growing away from the earth enacts a wild event. It means democratic in the sense that, as Whitman wrote:
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than
the journey-work of the stars. . .
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger
sextillions of infidels (6)
New World means that, as Whitman wrote, “I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart.” New World means, as Whitman said, “By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.”

In Democratic Vistas, Whitman declared,
As the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom, the same present the greatest lessons also in New World politics and progress . . . Sole among nationalities, these States have assumed the task to put in forms of history, power and practicality, on areas of amplitude rivaling the operations of the physical kosmos, the moral political speculations of ages, long, long deffer’d, the democratic republican principle, and the theory of development and perfection by voluntary standards and self reliance.
Listen to this white father; he is so weird! Here he is calling aloud for an American, a democratic spirit. An American, a democratic idea that could morally constrain and coordinate the material body of USA affluence and piratical outreach, more than a hundred years ago he wrote,
The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the lifeblood of democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it from other lands, ultra marine, have had their birth in courts, and bask’d and grown in castle sunshine; all smells of princes’ favors ... Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? ... We see the sons and daughters of The New World, ignorant of its genius, not yet inaugurating the native, the universal, and the near, still importing the distant, the partial, the dead.
Abhorring the “thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-song, tinkling rhymes,” Whitman conjured up a poetry of America, a poetry of democracy which would not “mean the smooth walks, trimm’d hedges, poseys and nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather, though weighing billions of tons.”

Well, what happened?

Whitman went ahead and wrote the poetry demanded by his vision. He became, by thousands upon thousands of words, a great American poet:
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day
Or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories,
and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird. . . (7)
And, elsewhere, he wrote:
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation,
or ever some many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky,
so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river
and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet
hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats,
I look’d. . . (8)
This great American poet of democracy as cosmos, this poet of a continent as consciousness, this poet of the many people as one people, this poet of diction comprehensible to all, of a vision insisting on each, of a rhythm/a rhetorical momentum to transport the reader from the Brooklyn ferry into the hills of Alabama and back again, of line after line of bodily, concrete detail that constitutes the mysterious the cellular tissue of a nation indivisible but dependent upon and astonishing in its diversity, this white father of a great poetry deprived of its spontaneous popularity/a great poetry hidden away from the ordinary people it celebrates so well, he has been, again and again, cast aside as an undisciplined poseur, a merely freak eruption of prolix perversities.

Last year, the New York Times Book Review saw fit to import a European self-appointed critic of American literature to address the question: Is there a great American poet? Since this visitor was ignorant of the philosophy and the achievements of Walt Whitman, the visitor, Denis Donoghue, comfortably excluded every possible descendent of Whitman from his erstwhile cerebrations. Only one woman was mentioned (she, needless to add, did not qualify). No poets under fifty, and not one Black or First World poet received even cursory assessment. Not one poet of distinctively New World values, and their formal embodiment, managed to dent the suavity of Donoghue’s public display.

This New York Times event perpetuated American habits of beggarly, absurd deference to the Old World. And these habits bespeak more than marketplace intrusions into cultural realms. We erase ourselves through self hatred. We lend our silence to the American anti-American process whereby anything and anyone special to this nation state becomes liable to condemnation because it is what it is, truly.

Against self hatred there is Whitman and there are all of the New World poets who insistently devise legitimate varieties of cultural nationalism. There is Whitman and all of the poets whose lives have been baptized by witness to blood, by witness to cataclysmic, political confrontations from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era, through the Women’s Movement, and on and on through the conflicts between the hungry and the well-fed, the wasteful, the bullies.

In the poetry of the New World, you meet with a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life. There is an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge, an easily deciphered system of reference, aspirations to a believable, collective voice and, consequently, emphatic preference for broadly accessible, spoken language. Deliberately balancing perception with vision, it seeks to match moral exhortation with sensory report.

All of the traceable descendants of Whitman have met with an establishment, academic reception disgracefully identical; except for the New World poets who live and write beyond the boundaries of the USA, the offspring of this one white father encounter everlasting marketplace disparagement as crude or optional or simplistic or, as Whitman himself wrote “hankering, gross, mystical, nude.”

I too am a descendant of Walt Whitman. And I am not by myself struggling to tell the truth about this history of so much land and so much blood, of so much that should be sacred and so much that has been desecrated and annihilated boastfully.

My brothers and my sisters of this New World, we remember that, as Whitman said,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate
itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize (9)
We do not apologize that we are not Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Or, as Whitman exclaimed, “I exist as I am, that is enough.”

New World poetry moves into and beyond the lives of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Aghostino Neto, Gabriela Mistral, Langston Hughes, and Margaret Walker. I follow this movement with my own life. I am calm and smiling as we go. Is it not written, somewhere very near to me:
A man’s body at auction . . .
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders
they cannot be high enough for it . . .
And didn’t that weird white father predict this truth that is always growing:
I swear to you the architects shall appear without fail,
I swear to you they will understand you and justify you,
The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you
and encloses all and is faithful to all,
He and rest shall not forget you, they shall
perceive that you are not an iota less than they,
You shall be fully glorified in them (10)
Walt Whitman and all of the New World poets coming after him, we, too, go on singing this America.


*Given that they were first to exist on the planet and currently make up the majority, the author will refer to that part of the population usually termed Third World as the First World.

Notes

1. from “I Sing the Body Electric,” by Walt Whitman
2. from Section XII of The Heights of Macho Picchu, translated by Nathaniel Tarn, Farrar Straus and Giroux: New York
3. from The Heights of Macho Picchu, translated by Ben Bolitt, Evergreen Press
4. from “Woes and the Furies,” by Pablo Neruda in Selected Poems of Neruda, translated by Ben Bolitt, p. 101
5. Ibid. “The Dictators,” p. 161
6. from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
7. from “There was a Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman
8. from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
9. from “Song of Myself”
10. from “Song of the Rolling Earth”

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/179325

ESSAY
What to Do About Poetry
The argument that keeps on giving.

BY THE EDITORS
In a recent article on the Poetry Foundation, The New Yorker lobs the latest volley in an ongoing intellectual debate. That is, who reads poetry, what does it mean to “understand” poetry, and who cares about poets? According to The New Yorker (or to the critics it quotes), the Poetry Foundation's mission to broaden the audience for poetry is a lamentable one, for with popularity comes mediocrity. Artists should worry about making art, not about who's looking at it. A position similar to The New Yorker’s was put forth by August Kleinzahler in the April 2004 issue of Poetry, when he and Dana Gioia faced off over Garrison Keillor's populist anthology, Good Poems. More recently John Barr's article calling for a "new American poetry" that speaks to a broader audience fomented debate in the academic and creative writing world. And, in Christian Wiman's editorial in the December 2006 issue of Poetry, he argues that "if we honored its rarity more, poetry's invisibility would be less of a problem, or at least we might define the notion of visibility differently."

Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry, was passionately engaged in these arguments when she started the magazine in 1912. With Ezra Pound as her editor at large, she published great modernists such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and H.D., and she introduced William Butler Yeats to American audiences. She believed there was new writing the world needed to read. (Further proof poet-bickering never stops, Pound considered Monroe hopelessly provincial and tame.) There's always been—and may always be—tension between the process of discovering true poetry and getting that poetry into the hands of people who want to read it, or into the hands of people who didn’t know to read it, but may find within it revelation, satisfaction, humor, mystery. Here are a few links in the chain of this argument, which, by its very persistence, is evidence that poetry is not dead.

Read The New Yorker article>>

Read David Orr's article "Annals of Poetry" in the The New York Times Book Review>>


Read August Kleinzahler's article from the April 2004 issue of Poetry>>

Read Dana Gioia's article from the April 2004 issue of Poetry>>

Read John Barr's essay>>

Read Christian Wiman's editorial from the December 2006 issue of Poetry>>

Read Helen Vendler's "The Closet Reader">>

Read Robert Pinksy on "Poets Who Don't Like Poetry">>

Read Bill Knott on whether institutionalized “creative writing” changed American literature>>

Read Adrienne Rich's "Poetry and Commitment">>

Read Jane Hirshfield on "Poetry Beyond the Classroom">>

Read Daniel Halpern and Langdon Hammer on William Logan's review of Hart Crane's Complete Poems and Selected Letters>>

Read Jorie Graham's "Introduction to the Best American Poetry">>

Read D.W. Fenza on "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?">>
Originally Published: March 10, 2007

Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry, was passionately engaged in these arguments when she started the magazine in 1912. With Ezra Pound as her editor at large, she published great modernists such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and H.D., and she introduced William Butler Yeats to American audiences. She believed there was new writing the world needed to read. (Further proof poet-bickering never stops, Pound considered Monroe hopelessly provincial and tame.) There's always been—and may always be—tension between the process of discovering true poetry and getting that poetry into the hands of people who want to read it, or into the hands of people who didn’t know to read it, but may find within it revelation, satisfaction, humor, mystery. Here are a few links in the chain of this argument, which, by its very persistence, is evidence that poetry is not dead.

^^^^ This. Tis' so verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry true!--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/lear...e/245494#guide

John Donne: “A Valediction: of Weeping”
Reality and representation mix in this classic poem.

BY JOEL BROUWER
John Donne probably wrote “A Valediction: of Weeping” after he met his future wife, Ann More, and before he took holy orders and turned most of his authorial energies to sermons and spiritual meditations. We can’t be sure about the timing, though; while we have Donne’s biography and his poems, aligning the two is tricky. We know that Donne wrote poems only for himself and a close circle of friends and patrons, never for fame and seldom for publication. It would seem reasonable to guess that “A Valediction: of Weeping”—which, like a number of Donne’s love poems, dramatizes a scene of lovers parting—might have been written during the early years of his marriage, when Donne was often obliged to be away from home, leaving his young wife and children alone. But we can’t be sure that the poem isn’t wholly an act of imagination with no connection to Donne’s personal experience.

This uncertainty has permitted some of Donne’s readers to regard his poems not as acts of self-expression, but as the abstracted, cerebral constructions of a fierce wit. Yes, the poems may be autobiographical, but Donne’s predilection for intricate rhetorical figures, paradoxes, surprising swerves in tone, associative leaps, and ingenious conceits can make them feel artificial, or made of artifice. Donne’s reputation as merely a wit made his work deeply unpopular for many years after his death. Probably the most famous condemnation came from Samuel Johnson, who labeled Donne’s style “metaphysical”—he didn’t intend the term as a compliment.

In the early 20th century, incipient Modernists, most notably T.S. Eliot, found new layers of value in Donne. His perceived cool intellectualism seemed fresh and vigorous to poets grown weary of Romanticism’s emotionalism and emphasis on the self. Donne soon became a favorite of the New Critics as well. That school’s emphasis on reading poems as autonomous systems—discounting extra-textual considerations such as the author’s intentions and historical situation—was well suited to Donne’s poetry; his intentions are difficult or impossible to determine, and each poem he wrote seemed designed to function as, to use a phrase from one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, “a little world made cunningly.”

Donne’s poems in general, and “A Valediction: of Weeping” in particular, are certainly cunning. But it would be a mistake to think of them as nothing more than exercises in cleverness. We’ll find in this poem, as in many others by Donne, that his wit often serves as a means to a larger end rather than as an end in itself. The poem may be a highly organized “little world,” but it consistently gestures toward a larger world: the actual, chaotic, emotional one in which we live.

“A Valediction: of Weeping” begins with a scene of two lovers parting:

Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth

The poet is asking for his lover’s indulgence. If he cries now, while he’s still with her, her “face” will be reflected in his tears, transforming them from ordinary waste into objects of value—“coins.” The poet isn’t asking for a physical connection here; he doesn’t say “embrace me before I go.” Instead he seeks to reflect and be reflected by the beloved, at once emphasizing their connection and the fact that they are already—even now before his departure—undeniably separate. This dynamic might be similar to the one we enter into while reading Donne’s poem. On the one hand, the clever figures and rhyme scheme remind us that the poem is an artificial construct of symbols and sounds. But at the same time, the poem’s dramatic situation encourages us to identify with the speaker’s authentic human grief. Let’s look at the entire first stanza:

Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth,
For thus they be
Pregnant of thee;
Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more,
When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore.

The financial metaphor of lines 3 and 4 suggests that there’s a transaction involved here, and we see already an example of the kind of hall-of-mirrors paradox Donne so relished, and will soon use again, in this very poem. Perhaps the speaker is departing to earn actual coins to support the beloved. If so, that would be a gesture of unification and shared purpose, but at the same time one ironically requiring separation. In order to be with you, Donne seems to imply, I must leave you.

In line 7 Donne suggests that his tears are both “fruits” of his present grief at parting and “emblems” of his future grief, when he will be away. (Of course, this “grief” might also be understood not as the grief of parting from the beloved, but as the grief of having to undertake the journey in the first place.) So the tears are literal and metaphorical, physical and symbolic, at the same time. Similarly, the poem as a whole can be seen both as a sincere expression of grief and as an “emblem”—a representation, that is—of grief.

The next two lines feature a tricky metaphor for the speaker’s future sorrow:

When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore.

As his own tear falls, his beloved’s reflection falls with it. He and she both become “nothing”; her reflection falls and thus vanishes, and he, like his tear, departs. If he is departing on a sea voyage—as “divers shore” might suggest—then we may add another dimension to this already crowded conceit. Both tears and the sea are salty water, and here tears figuratively signify the impending separation, just as the sea will literally enforce it. Keeping in mind that a “fall” in a relationship can refer to unfaithfulness, this line could even be read as a premonition of adultery: the tears provoked by my sorrow at leaving you fall, just as you will fall into unfaithfulness when I’m gone. Following this line of thinking, “So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore” turns to pure bitterness: when we’re apart, we’re nothing to each other.

So while we could read this first stanza as the heartfelt cry of a lover in anguish, devastated to be separated from his beloved, it’s also possible to take these lines as the cynical complaint of a husband who feels persecuted in his role as breadwinner and, even worse, unsure of his wife’s fidelity. Which of these is the correct reading? It’s a natural question to ask, but also a misleading one, because the great pleasure in reading Donne lies in just this kind of ambiguity. His poems are incredibly detailed, specific, and intricate, but at the same time mysterious, vague, and elusive. Here again, we’re led to consider the ways in which the poem both invites us to identify with the speaker’s emotions, and reminds us that what we’re looking at here is not a person but a poem. We’ll see this dynamic continue throughout the rest of the poem, as Donne oscillates between the tangible and the conceptual, the literal and the metaphorical. By the time we get to the final lines, it may even seem that the poem is more concerned with the gap between reality and imagination than it is with its ostensible subject of two lovers parting.

The next stanza introduces a new metaphor that is related—appropriately, given the occasion of the poem—to the idea of travel.

On a round ball
A workman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, all,
So doth each tear,
Which thee doth wear,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.

This stanza’s transformation of a “nothing” into an “all” is similar to an idea expressed near the end of another Donne poem, “The Canonization.” Both poems use the figure of a world contained in a reflection, and in each case great stress is put on the metaphysical nature of that containment: the physical object is captured in a reflection, but so is the object’s essence. In “The Canonization” it isn’t just the “world” that is contained in the “glasses of your eyes,” but the “whole world’s soul.” The distinction is important. Donne is alluding to the Christian theory of transubstantiation, where the base physical representations of bread and wine are transformed, by the intercession of the Holy Ghost, into holy reality: the body and blood of Christ. Analogous processes occur in “A Valediction: of Weeping.” Much as the tears in line 7 were shown to be both physical “fruits” and metaphysical “emblems,” here Donne conflates reality (the “world” in which we actually live) and representation (the “globe” we use as an icon of that world). A blank ball is nothing until it’s overlaid with maps to become an “all.” A tear is nothing until it reflects the face of the beloved and becomes an “all.” And perhaps the poem itself is both a nothing—a mere collection of sounds and symbols—and yet also an “all,” a container for the poet’s genuine emotions.

The final lines of the second stanza may contain the most knotty ideas in a very knotty poem:

Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.

How are we to understand the phrase “This world” here? There are several possible readings, and as elsewhere in the poem, they range from the simple and concrete to the complex and abstract. “This world” could be the real world the lovers see around them: If we both cry, our eyes will fill with tears, and we literally won’t be able to see each other anymore. But of course the figure also works as a metaphor for the characters’ emotional states: Our mutual sorrow at parting destroys the heaven-on-earth we make when we’re together. Finally, keep in mind the maps Donne showed us earlier in the stanza. The speaker’s tears might also be obscuring his vision of that globe, a “little world made cunningly” that in turn represents the literal earth. Again Donne succeeds in “mixing” the real and the figurative.

“Mixed” might not refer to a literal mixing of the two lovers’ tears, but instead to the process of reproduction—the oscillation of reality and representation—that is gradually manifesting itself as the poem’s central concern. The two lines might suggest that watery reflections of the lovers are being created and destroyed endlessly: in reflecting, or mixing with, each other’s tears, the lovers “overflow” and destroy those reflections, the faces-within-tears from the first stanza. We see the lovers’ (real) tears as images within images, endlessly generative and endlessly in decay.

Immediately following his sequence of globe and water imagery, Donne compares his beloved to the moon, the sphere that controls the flow of tides.

O more than moon,

Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere,
Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea, what it may do too soon;
Let not the wind
Example find,
To do me more harm, than it purposeth;
Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath,
Whoe’er sighs most, is cruelest, and hastes the other’s death.

The beloved is “more than” the moon: not only can she can draw tears from herself, but she can pull those tears all the way up into her own “sphere,” or presence, where the poet is as well. Donne exhorts her not to use her power to “draw … up seas,” that is, to weep, because it could “drown” him in at least three ways. His reflection would be drowned when caught in her tears; seeing her cry would figuratively drown him in sorrow; and if her tears inadvertently “teach the sea” and give an “example” to the wind, he might literally be drowned when he sets sail on his voyage.

The poem’s closing “breath” metaphor, which appropriately follows the “wind” image, once again asserts the union of the lovers: Because we breathe as one when we’re together, our sighs of sorrow use up each other’s breath, and so hasten each other’s death. As we might have expected, Donne ends the poem with a paradox. We tend to associate breath with life, but here an excess of breath leads to death. This metaphor, like the earlier tear/reflection conceit, warns the beloved that her physical expressions of grief—crying, sighing—cause emotional harm. When she cries she drowns his reflection in her tears; when she sighs she steals his life-breath. Once again, the metaphorical and the real appear to be so closely aligned as to become indistinguishable.

This breath figure also has an echo in “The Canonization,” where we find similar images of the lovers as a single being:

Call her one, me another fly,
We are tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find the eagle and the dove…

In these lines, as in “A Valediction: of Weeping,” the poet and his beloved form one being. That’s not an original idea, but it becomes original when we note that in each case this union is destructive as well as creative. In “The Canonization” the lovers are both flies and the candles that burn the flies, so they “at [their] own cost die”: the fact of their union is also the cause of their destruction. “The eagle and the dove” is a similarly murderous figure, since eagles kill doves. So too in “A Valediction: of Weeping” the lovers are united—in teary reflections and in breath—but those very unions threaten the lovers with ruin. As in the lines about mixed tears overflowing “this world,” the poem’s closing lines suggest the idea of love as a self-perpetuating cycle of creation and destruction. The great achievement of “A Valediction: of Weeping” is its powerful evocation of this very paradox—not only in terms of the lovers, who appear to be simultaneously united and divided, but in terms of the poem itself, which persistently demands that we read it as both artificial and earnest, self-contained and suggestive, a “nothing” and an “all.”