Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Balu]

Robert, thank you for your two above posts. They were very interesting to read.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250242

ESSAY
First Loves
A formative moment, fixed in poets’ minds.

BY LYNN MELNICK AND BRETT FLETCHER LAUER

The Goodwill near Hollywood in the late ’80s was filled with outdated lampshades, corny figurines, and myriad mugs. It was also where, for 50 cents each, one of us—Lynn, to be specific—purchased The American Poetry Anthology, edited by Daniel Halpern, and Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch, by Diane Wakoski. As for Brett, he didn’t have to search the used-book bins; when he began writing poetry as a teenager, his older brother sent home volumes from college: Sharon Olds’s Satan Says, Mark Strand’s Selected Poems, and the poetry anthology Walk on the Wild Side.

Years later, when the two of us were talking about our early discoveries, it became apparent how much these collections had provided a gateway for us into the world of contemporary poetry. It was with the hope of providing a similarly exhilarating experience to emerging readers and poets that we compiled our anthology Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation.

In editing, we felt it was important not just to bring contemporary poems to a younger audience but to bring contemporary poets to a younger audience. So much of the poetry taught in schools is written by long-dead poets, and we wanted the readers to get to know the poets as real people, with real, 21st-century lives.

To that end, we sent a questionnaire to all 100 poets included in the anthology, and we included excerpts of their answers in the biographical notes of the book. (You can view them in their entirety here.) We asked the poets questions such as “What is your favorite word?” and “What is the natural talent you would most like to have?” (One-third of the poets listed “singing.”)

For us, though, the most compelling answers were to the question “What was the first poem you read and loved?” For poets, this question seems to recall other first questions they might find themselves asked by a friend: Do you remember your first kiss, or the first concert you attended? It is a formative moment, fixed in poets’ minds, and each tells a story.

We realized that the poets’ answers to this question created a persuasive list for further reading, what we began to call a “shadow anthology.” The following is an edited selection of the responses we received on first-poetry loves, from what we consider to be some of the most exciting poets writing today.


Srikanth Reddy
I probably read a lot of poems before I ever fell in love with one—you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs, as they say—but I do remember the first poem that rocked my world: “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” by Wallace Stevens. I’ll never forget that drunk and dreaming sailor at the end.

Jennifer Chang
One of the first poems I found and loved was in a book my grandfather left behind in our house, The World’s Best Poems, edited by Mark Van Doren, which I now keep on my office bookshelves. I was a gloomy little girl of about 11 or 12 and, upon reading that old book, went just crazy for Heinrich Heine, particularly the last stanza of “Mein Kind, Wir Waren Kinder”: “The children’s games are over, / The rest is over with youth— / The world, the good games, the good times, / The belief, and the love, and the truth.” I swooned over this gloomiest of poems and underlined those particular lines repeatedly, as if that would make the words spring to life.

Timothy Donnelly
The first poems I remember loving were among the things I read in high school English class: poems by Dickinson, Keats, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (if that counts); Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land. Later on I read Baudelaire, Plath, Rimbaud, and Sexton on my own, as well as other Stevens poems, including “Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow,” the first poem whose hold on me was so powerful I felt like I must have written it myself.

Hafizah Geter
The first two books of poetry I ever owned were Been to Yesterdays: Poems of a Life, by Lee Bennett Hopkins, and a collection of Langston Hughes’s poems for children, Don’t You Turn Back. My mother was always reading Langston Hughes to my sister and me, and she would assign us poems from that book to memorize. At six I was reciting “My People,” and my sister, “Mother to Son,” for family friends. Been to Yesterdays was the first book of poems I ever picked out for myself. I remember staying up late at night and reading it under the covers with a flashlight. The experience of those two books is where I began as a writer. They’ve come with me on every move and are two of my most important possessions.

Dorothea Lasky
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I know it is technically a work of fiction, but it reads like a poem to me. I remember staying up one night when I was 10 to read it for the first time and feeling very proud by the time the morning sun arrived that I had finished. The images have stuck with me all my life. Then, years later, at age 15, I first read Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103°” and I thought: “I want to write poems like this!”

Mark Bibbins
When I was 12 or 13 I saw some E.E. Cummings poems and that was that—their weirdness was something that has sustained and challenged me ever since.

Erika L. Sanchez
I first became enamored with poetry when my sixth-grade teacher had us read Edgar Allan Poe. I was a fairly lonely and depressed 12-year-old, so Poe’s dark and gloomy poems really spoke to me. I specifically remember reading the poem “Alone,” and my first thought was something like “Wow! This creepy guy really understands me!”

Shane Book
The first poems I remember reading were “Alligator Pie” by Dennis Lee and Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” though perhaps it was actually my father who read them to me while I stared at the black marks on the pages, saying the words a half-second after he did, a little echo curled into him on the couch. I do recall spending every spare waking moment for what seemed like a week but could have been a month, reading Homer’s Iliad and somewhere near the end of the book being stoked to find out there was a sequel and that it was called The Odyssey. Lying on my bed, in this two-minute break between ending one book-length epic poem and starting another I was seized by a feeling, a strange mixture of anxiety and adrenaline.

Adrian Matejka
Other than almost everything in Where the Sidewalk Ends, the first poem I loved was Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up.” I didn’t know poetry permitted cursing. More than that, it was the first time I felt like I got a poem.

Ben Lerner
My mom taught me “The Purple Cow” when I was very little. I loved it and the tragic story of the poet who could never outrun the fame of his nonsense verse, no matter how seriously he wanted to be taken.

CAConrad
I grew up in rural America, where everyone worked in factories and didn’t read much. As a result books, especially poetry books, were hard to come by, but Emily Dickinson was on our local library’s shelf. I fell in love with her poems, and remain in love with them. Don’t listen to any of the stories you will hear about Dickinson being a sad, wilting lily hiding in her Amherst house writing her sad poems. She was courageous! It’s simply not possible to have centuries of poetry come up to your doorstep and reject it all and write something new, and not be absolutely courageous. Emily Dickinson is my American hero.

Metta Sáma
My dad had about a thousand pens imprinted with the last two lines of “Invictus” by the poet William Ernest Henley: “I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul.” My memory tells me that he added the phrase “By God’s grace,” but that could be a false memory, something to do with having so much of my young life in and about church. Those lines have followed me around my entire life; it was the only poetry (or snippet of poetry) we had in our house, and I both loved and hated the lines. Loved them because, of course, they inspire us to be individual, to control as much of our destiny as we can. Somehow, having the words trapped on pens, particularly those pens with the eraser tops, the heavy tip, the heavier ink, that stayed stored in my father’s drawer, made me question what, exactly, “fate” and “soul” were, for my father, for myself, for this writer whose name I did not know, but whose words my father, beyond the pens, said to us. It was the first time in my (very very young) life that I understood the true nature of words: they are stored in our blood, scratched into our bones; our taste buds are words; fingerprints, words.
Originally Published: March 11, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/177209

The Immense Intimacy, the Intimate Immensity
BY EDWARD HIRSCH

The profound intimacy of lyric poetry makes it perilous because it gets so far under the skin, into the skin. “For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences,” Rilke wrote in a famous passage from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I am convinced the kind of experience—the kind of knowledge—one gets from poetry cannot be duplicated elsewhere. The spiritual life wants articulation—it wants embodiment in language. The physical life wants the spirit. I know this because I hear it in the words, because when I liberate the message in the bottle a physical—a spiritual—urgency pulses through the arranged text. It is as if the spirit grows in my hands. Or the words rise in the air. “Roots and wings,” the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez writes, “But let the wings take root and the roots fly.”

There are people who defend themselves against being “carried away” by poetry, thus depriving themselves of an essential aspect of the experience. But there are others who welcome the transport poetry provides. They welcome it repeatedly. They desire it so much they start to crave it daily, nightly, nearly abject in their desire, seeking it out the way hungry people seek food. It is spiritual sustenance to them. Bread and wine. A way of transformative thinking. A method of transfiguration. There are those who honor the reality of roots and wings in words, but also want the wings to take root, to grow into the earth, and the roots to take flight, to ascend. They need such falling and rising, such metaphoric thinking. They are so taken by the ecstatic experience—the overwhelming intensity—of reading poems they have to respond in kind. And these people become poets.

Emily Dickinson is one of my models of a poet who responded completely to what she read. Here is her compelling test of poetry:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know. Is there any other way.
Dickinson recognizes true poetry by the extremity—the actual physical intensity—of her response to it. It’s striking that she doesn’t say she knows poetry because of any intrinsic qualities of poetry itself. Rather, she recognizes it by contact; she knows it by what it does to her, and she trusts her own response. Of course, only the strongest poetry could effect such a response. Her aesthetic is clear: always she wants to be surprised, to be stunned, by what one of her poems calls “Bolts of Melody.”

Dickinson had a voracious appetite for reading poetry. She read it with tremendous hunger and thirst—poetry was sustenance to her. Much has been made of her reclusion, but, as her biographer Richard Sewall suggests, “She saw herself as a poet in the company of the Poets—and, functioning as she did mostly on her own, read them (among other reasons) for company.” He also points to Dickinson’s various metaphors for the poets she read. She called them “the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul,” her “Kinsmen of the Shelf,” her “enthralling friends, the immortalities.” She spoke of the poet’s “venerable Hand” that warmed her own. Dickinson was a model of poetic responsiveness because she read with her whole being.

One of the books Emily Dickinson marked up, Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), recommends that people read for “soul-culture.” I like that dated nineteenth-century phrase because it points to the depth that can be shared by the community of solitaries who read poetry. I, too, read for soul-culture—the culture of the soul. That’s why the intensity of engagement I have with certain poems, certain poets, is so extreme. Reading poetry is for me an act of the most immense intimacy, of intimate immensity. I am shocked by what I see in the poem but also by what the poem finds in me. It activates my secret world, commands my inner life. I cannot get access to that inner life any other way than through the power of the words themselves. The words pressure me into a response, and the rhythm of the poem carries me to another plane of time, outside of time.

Rhythm can hypnotize and alliteration can be almost hypnotic. A few lines from Tennyson’s The Princess can still send me into a kind of trance:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmurings of innumerable bees.
And I can still get lost when Hart Crane links the motion of a boat with an address to his lover in part 2 of “Voyages”:

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
The words move ahead of the thought in poetry. The imagination loves reverie, the daydreaming capacity of the mind set in motion by words, by images.

As a reader, the hold of the poem over me can be almost embarrassing because it is so childlike, because I need it so much to give me access to my own interior realms. It plunges me into the depths (and poetry is the literature of depths) and gives a tremendous sense of another world growing within. (“There is another world and it is in this one,” Paul Éluard wrote.) I need the poem to enchant me, to shock me awake, to shift my waking consciousness and open the world to me, to open me up to the world—to the word—in a new way. I am pried open. The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being. And yet the work of art is beyond existential embarrassment. It is mute and plaintive in its calling out, its need for renewal. It needs a reader to possess it, to be possessed by it. Its very life depends upon it.


Originally Published: January 23, 2006

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This is a very informative article both on Emily Dickinson and on why we poets write.
Even despite criticisms we write!
Ever notice how painters/artists putting color on paper rarely get such criticisms?--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/177877

ESSAY
Nature Rules
A reading by Mary Oliver at the 92nd Street Y.

BY DARA MANDLE
What do the actor Steve Buscemi and two nuns have in common? An appreciation for Mary Oliver, the reigning queen of nature poetry. Oliver writes often in her newer verse about “the light of the world.” No surprise, then, to spot sisters of mercy at the poet’s January reading at New York’s 92nd Street Y. But Mr. Pink? Wouldn’t lyrics about the virtue of green beans be a touch too cozy for such a rough character? No, it turns out.

Judging from the size of the crowd that night, and from the sales of her current book, New and Selected Poems: Volume Two, it seems that many people—and not just those obviously drawn to daisies—need cheer.

Oliver’s minimalist stage persona and sense of humor undercut the frequent sentimentality of her lyrics. In person, she makes sure her fans are getting their money’s worth—in this case, $17 per ticket. They gave her a rock star’s reception when she strode to the podium after being introduced by Alice Quinn, director of the Poetry Society of America and poetry editor of The New Yorker.

Although she won both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Oliver’s demeanor is more PB&J than port. She has what most poets outwardly disdain but secretly covet: readers. Her work might appear only occasionally in graduate curricula, but it registers mightily on the reorder lists at Barnes & Noble.

Many of the poems to which she gave voice at her reading were from her most recent New and Selected volume. The audience responded avidly to the few poems about her dog, Percy. “Oxygen,” a manuscript facsimile of which was reprinted in the evening’s program, was dedicated to her partner of more than 40 years, artist Molly Malone Cook, who died recently (your life . . . is so close / to my own that I would not know / where to drop the knife of / separation. And what does this have to do / with love, except / everything?).

“Do you want to hear this?” Oliver asked as she prepared to read “Wild Geese.” In this popular poem, the sound of geese reminds readers of their “place/in the family of things.” A friend found her question a cringe worthy attention ploy—but he doesn’t go to many poetry readings. I found Oliver’s commitment to her audience refreshing. After all, many had braved rain and two subways to get here.

By reading’s end her directness, which had at first invigorated, began to wear thin. In her introduction, Quinn had noted, “Like Frost, Oliver is a poet of belief.” Yet Frost let the darkness in his poems gradually seep out; one might not even detect it in a first reading. Oliver often tells us point-blank to move toward the light—or, as she writes, toward “the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over / all of us.”

And yet, Oliver acknowledges sorrow and mourning. One of the reasons her audience is so dedicated to her is because she lets them in. After reading the poem for her partner, Oliver shared three lines she’d read at her memorial service. In an age when so many writers build walls between themselves and their readers, Oliver opens windows. And why not? Her fans relish the view.
Originally Published: March 20, 2006
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My belief is-- ask a poet to write about Nature and if that poet cannot do so--he/she is a fraud.
For Love and Nature are by far the too easiest subjects to write poetry about IMHO.
With death and despair being on the other side of that scale.. -Tyr

Now do not let the word "easy" in that comment fool you. Easy to write about , but much harder to make an "impression with" in regards to other poets reading your work or getting such published! -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/246768

INTERVIEW
Unsettling Emily Dickinson
The co-editor of The Gorgeous Nothings talks about the challenges of editing the iconic poet.

BY THE EDITORS

Years ago, when scholar Marta Werner turned 22, she received a birthday present that she calls life-altering. It was a copy of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson. “I had no idea that a work of scholarship could take this form—and could embody such freedom,” Werner says. The editors of poetryfoundation.org recently spoke with Werner about her collaboration with Jen Bervin on The Gorgeous Nothings, why she’d prefer to distance herself from the term “envelope poems,” and why Emily Dickinson’s work remains so relevant today.

Can you talk about the publishing history of Emily Dickinson?

Yes, but I’d like to go back to a moment before that history begins so we can see what is at stake in that history. And so, perhaps, we can imagine a counterhistory.

According to Dickinson’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Dickinson’s “only writing desk [was] … a table, 18-inches square, with a drawer deep enough to take in her ink bottle, paper and pen … [and] placed in the corner by the window facing west.” This image of Dickinson’s desk is so familiar to her readers, so imprinted on our imaginations. And yet the desk can only be a supreme fiction.

The instant we begin to picture it, we realize it could not have been Dickinson’s writing desk—at least not her only desk. How could the delicate table have withstood the weight of her books? How could it have tolerated the pressure of her hand in the “white heat” of writing every day across the days of more than 30 years? And how could it have accommodated the thousands of leaves of blank paper Dickinson turned into manuscripts?

Just past the image of the pristine writing desk another, more unruly image is forming. I see the desk laden with volumes, open and closed—the family Bible; the novels of the Brontës, George Eliot, Charles Dickens; Ruskin’s Modern Painters. I see it covered with rows of botanical specimens: Jasminum, Calendula officinalis, Digitalis. And beyond it, I see the room that gives the desk space, filling with papers. There are stacks of them on the table, on the floor, on the bed.

She moves them. Others living in the household and coming from outside of it move them. The wind moves them. Time moves them. My imagination moves them.

I see, of course, only what I see in the mind’s eye. For, like Bianchi, like everyone, I have arrived too late: I do not catch Dickinson in the act of writing.

I do not see how she arranges and stab-binds the gatherings of poems we call fascicles, or how she archives them, whether with other bound gatherings only, or intermixed with loose sheets and fragments. I do not see how, or even if, she distinguishes among poems, prose, and passages of indeterminate genre. I do not see her search for a poem written years earlier to revise or only to reread it. As she herself wrote, there is so much more I “cannot see to see -”

Just as I do not see the room as it appeared while Dickinson lived within it, I do not see it in the days and months following her death, when her papers were discovered, sorted, some destroyed, and others disseminated.

I do not see the clearing away of her effects, nor do I know if this process was carried out systematically or at chance’s hands. I do not know if those entrusted to the task worked patiently or were overwhelmed by what they found. Was there, as the story goes, only a single locked box containing thousands of poem manuscripts? Where has this (Pandora’s) box and its key gone? And if there was only one box, containing the poems, where were the letter drafts and fragments? Was one box actually many boxes?

After all the manuscripts have been carried away from Dickinson’s room, questions whirl in their place and do not settle.

All the editions of Dickinson’s writings are also attempts to “settle” the work. And it’s for that reason that I work on unediting her writings. It’s a way of unsettling them—though not, of course, the way Dickinson may have unsettled them.

The poems and other writings in The Gorgeous Nothings were all in print by 1958. A careful reader can find them in Johnson’s Poems (1955) and in his Letters (1958). But you’d be surprised to know how many people think that the writings in The Gorgeous Nothings are new discoveries. Even people who know Dickinson well can’t recall seeing them before. And of course that’s because they haven’t seen them—they’ve only read them. Somehow, for reasons I don’t wholly understand, reading in manuscript is fundamentally different from reading in print. For some people—myself among them—it’s a kind of further seeing. It’s my hope—and Jen Bervin’s too, I’m sure—that The Gorgeous Nothings functions like a kind of light-table for these writings.

How did you first encounter Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems? Who first called them “envelope poems”? What does that mean?

I’ve been aware of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems for many years—at least since the mid-’90s, when I was working a lot in the Amherst College archives on Dickinson’s late drafts and fragments. At the time, I was fascinated by the various different constellations of documents that seemed, at least momentarily, to coalesce—poems pinned together, poems marked by cancellations and cross-outs, poems on envelopes, etc. Of course I don’t mean to suggest that these constellations or sets were conceived of as such by Dickinson—I have no idea how she organized her papers, and, beyond those she stab-bound into fascicles, there’s no readily discernible organizational schema. I just mean that when you look at documents for a long time—in an intense, even myopic way—you start to see things. Literally! The mind seeks formal principles—even where there may be none. I saw—and still see—all kinds of different sets and orders of Dickinson’s writings.

I’m not sure who first called these writings envelope poems. And, in some way, I’d like to distance myself from the term. It’s perhaps one of the hallmarks of Dickinson’s writings that they defeat the bibliographical and descriptive terms we use to talk about them. “Envelope poem,” then, is just a kind of shorthand we’ve used to identify writings—largely but not invariably in verse—composed on envelopes or envelope parts. The earliest of these envelope writings was probably composed around 1864, the date Ralph Franklin assigns to the last of Dickinson’s fascicles, and a small handful of other envelope texts belong to the same decade. The remaining envelope writings—or writings on envelopes, as I prefer to say—bear approximate composition dates ranging from 1870 to 1885. These writings were composed, then, in the aftermath of the fascicles and in a late period in the trajectory of Dickinson’s writing when, I believe, she was testing differently and for a final time the relationship between message and medium.

The envelopes are one of the many makeshift and fragile textual homes Dickinson imagined for her late writings. When I look at them, I think of Simone Weil’s moving words, “Vulnerability is the mark of their existence.”

That such documents survived—that they were saved—always amazes me.

What draws you to her work? And particularly her manuscripts? What’s it like to handle her manuscripts? To see her handwriting?

Writing is such a “reportless” place—the word is Dickinson’s, and it comes from a poem—indeed, a manuscript—that I love and that begins: “In many and reportless places – one feels a joy….”

While writing or thought is reportless, the manuscript is the material trace of that process and, I believe, of the joy that attends it.

When we review the history of our experience of the modern manuscript, we find that a specific vocabulary emerges, one suggestive of intimacy. Again and again, we find references to the “face” or “physiognomy” of the manuscript. In the earliest, least critical accounts of the manuscript, it was imagined as a reflecting glass by which we might see directly into the mind of the writer and the creative process. In extreme versions of this story, the manuscript might even appear as a surrogate for the writer.

Now, of course, very few manuscript scholars would subscribe to such beliefs. Today, we see manuscripts as cultural artifacts—not intimate keepsakes but artifacts estranged from us by distance and time. But this very distance—this alienation—also makes them readable in new ways. For me, the manuscript is a marvelous zone of inquiry. It reports something of the reportlessness of Dickinson’s compositional process—something about the disorderly dynamics of writing.

I’m painfully aware that no written document can ever translate completely the immaterial path of thought into material signs, but Dickinson’s manuscripts do permit us to follow that path, sometimes a short distance, sometimes much farther, and where the signs break off or become unreadable, where we come to a dead end, that too tells us something about the horizon of writing and the limits of any interpretation.

By abandoning the idea of the manuscript as mirror and, with it, our search for depth, we may begin to traverse its surface and decipher the traces inscribed upon it. When we do this, we encounter what the textual scholar Louis Hay has called the “third dimension” of the text, the passage of writing traced through time, the multiple, contradictory decisions made during the process of composition and registered in part in the spatial play of the hand across the paper.

And we see new things—things we didn’t see before. Signs of speed and of slowness often appear on the manuscript of the draft. In Dickinson’s case, accelerations in thought are marked in the slant of the writing or the blurring of ink or graphite. And sometimes we can also see a slowing down of composition, as if she was making her way more uncertainly, moving like a “stranger through the house of language.” There’s a beautiful draft of Dickinson’s poem “As Summer into Autumn slips” in which she compulsively reworks a passage, repeating and substituting the words “thought” and “shaft,” and when I look at these marks on the page, I can almost see her trying to redynamize the trace of writing. Gabriel Josipovici said that writing is “something that is happening … at the cross-roads of the mental and the physical.”

I think this is true. And beautiful.

The manuscript doesn’t necessarily encourage a teleological reading, either. For me, at least, the manuscript promotes a reading that wanders—and wonders. It compels us to attend to the minutest and most unrepeatable gestures of writing—to writing losing its thread sometimes in liberated strokes, sometimes in scribbles and erasures. For me, anyway, the draft tends to disturb the very idea of the still, absolute text, revealing it as only one possible realization of a matrix that precedes and sometimes follows it. Its interest lies in the uniqueness of its itinerary and its awareness of contingency.

I called the manuscript “reportless.” The poem I drew that word from reads: “In many and reportless | places | We feel a Joy – | Reportless, also, but | sincere as Nature | Or Deity - || It comes, without a | consternation - | Dissolves [Abates – Exhales -] – the same - | But leaves a | sumptuous [blissful] Destitution - | Without a Name - || Profane it by a | search – [pursuit] we cannot - | It has no home - | Nor we who having | once inhaled it – [waylaid it] | thereafter roam.”

But you have to see the manuscript—the way the final lines roam around the edges of the paper.

You’ve spoken about the work you did with Susan Howe at Buffalo—can you tell us about that again? How has Susan’s work inspired yours?

For my 22nd birthday, in 1987, a dear friend gave me a copy of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson. We were first-year graduate students then, in the English department at SUNY Buffalo, and Buffalo’s long connection with radical poetics made this an appropriate, perhaps even an expected, gift. But for me, My Emily Dickinson was a revelation. As an undergraduate at Ithaca College, I had read widely in poetry, but also conservatively. I’d never heard of Howe, and probably my former teachers had not either. More to the point, I had no idea that a work of scholarship could take this form—and could embody such freedom. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this single book changed the course of my work on Dickinson and very likely the course of my life.

The next year—to my great delight and terror—Howe came to Buffalo to teach a course. She was then about the age I am now, which is rather strange to think about! The course she taught focused on early American literature, and at its center were documents—17th-century captivity narratives and conversion narratives—most composed by women, most composed in extremis. It was riveting. Howe was always prepared. I think she must have spent hours and hours, probably days or weeks, writing her lectures. And when she spoke, she was moved by a kind of intensity and nervousness and conviction all at once that was profoundly compelling. She was—she is—fierce and fragile. She’s always at the very edge of thought.

I was unbelievably privileged to be her student. And it was just sheer luck. I never felt that I deserved the attention she gave me. There were so many others whose claims were greater—so many others who knew so much more about poetry than I did (or do). But she stayed with me, pressing me forward. She could be a harsh mentor—because she expected one’s artistic and scholarly commitments to be absolute—but she was also generous without measure.

When we finished The Gorgeous Nothings, I drafted the acknowledgment to her. It follows the formal, official acknowledgments to the libraries that gave us permission to study their collections, but it’s a private message, too, and one that conveys, I hope, love.

It reads:

“In the Dickinson archives where I have worked, I have sometimes fancied that an unseen hand guided my own, sifting the documents, holding one or another up to the light. That hand belongs to Susan Howe, whose original discoveries among Dickinson’s manuscripts encouraged these further forays. To her, whose felicitous joining of historical inquiry with poetic speculation transformed forever the landscape of Dickinson scholarship, I owe the deepest debt: ‘Sweet Debt of Life – Each Night to owe - / Insolvent – every Noon’ (Fascicle 15).”

What do you think Dickinson’s intention was in writing these poems?

I have no idea! But then again, I don’t really believe in a textual practice that seeks out authorial intentions. Perhaps I’m enough of an old formalist to imagine that these intentions are beside the point. Or perhaps—and this seems more likely to me—my long apprenticeship as a textual scholar has made me circumspect about such a project of recovery.

I don’t know “Emily Dickinson.” What I know—or try to know, as far as it is possible to do so—is the unruly textual body that survived her.

But I do think she was writing poems with an awareness of their significance—and, in the case of the envelope poems, of their strangeness. A lot of questions swirled around these documents when I looked at them—and very few of them can be answered.

In some cases, Dickinson wrote on envelopes that had carried letters into the Homestead from the outside world. We know this because these envelopes are addressed—sometimes to her, sometimes to another member of the household—by the familiar hands of Judge Lord, the Norcrosses, and others. In other cases, though, Dickinson herself addressed the envelopes to intimate friends—Mrs. Holland, Helen Hunt Jackson—outside the Homestead, but she seems never to have enclosed letters in the envelopes or sent them out into the world.

What we have instead of these letters—if, in fact, they ever existed—are poems. It’s tempting to think that the poems have taken the place of the letters—perhaps, even, that they were the true messages she wished to transmit. But this is far from certain.

What is more certain is that when she turned from the address to writing the poem, she was redirecting it. The addresses are all written in a beautiful, fair copy hand; the poems, by contrast, are all in her rough copy hand, which Higginson described as looking like the “fossil tracks of birds.” Maybe this is a sign that the address is public, while the poem is private. I don’t know. Somehow, I think the reverse may be true. Unlike the messages, those “fine and private things” that seem destined for enclosure in envelopes, the poems are freely dispersed to all. Although they may never have left her desk, they are en route, their itinerary open.

Tell us how The Gorgeous Nothings book came about.

When Jen Bervin and I first met to talk about collaborating on a Dickinson project, we knew each other’s work, but not each other. Bervin is a visual artist and a poet, and she has produced, among many other works, the remarkable Dickinson Composites, a series of six large-scale embroidered works based on palimpsestic collations of the punctuation and variant markers in Dickinson’s fascicles. I’m an itinerant textual scholar covering poetic grounds of the 19th and 20th centuries. We came from different worlds—she from an art and poetry world, and I from a scholarly and academic world—and we met on the margins of Dickinson’s poetry. Collaboration is never easy. We knew this. But we were both drawn to the problem of how best to represent the conditions of Dickinson’s late works—those works composed specifically beyond the book, in its aftermath—and we were both committed to finding a form for her unbound writings that might gather and scatter them at once. “The way | Hope builds his | House,” Dickinson wrote on an envelope in the shape of a house, “It is not with a sill -- | nor Rafter --”

We did not seek to produce an “edition” or even a “catalog raisonée,” since we felt that both these structures—carrying with them a history of definiteness and closure—countered Dickinson’s aims or, since those must remain unknowable, the manuscripts’ aesthetics of open-endedness. Rather, we imagined the object we were producing as a temporary shelter for the late work, open to reassembly and even disassembly in future.

That’s really how it started, and of course the first incarnation of The Gorgeous Nothings, published by Steve Clay at Granary Books, reflects this original vision. The contents arrive not between two covers but in an archival box, 12 by 15 inches, which must be unpacked, unfolded, and slowly sifted.

There are all kinds of centrifugal forces at work here. Of all the materials enclosed in The Gorgeous Nothings, the loose facsimiles and diplomatic transcripts, the guides and indices, only my essay introducing them—“Itineraries of Escape”—is bound, an acknowledgment that my own thoughts on my encounter with Dickinson’s writings are also bound to this specific moment in time. All the other contents of the box remain unfastened: “all adrift to go.” Like Emerson’s souls, neither touching not mingling, never quite composing a set, the envelope poems belong to a discontinuous series, or, as Cixous writes, a “book from which each page could be taken out.”

I wasn’t at all sure that the bound volume of these writings published by New Directions could capture this feeling—but I think it has. The design is simply splendid. I don’t know how they did it! I’ll always be deeply grateful to New Directions for their vision of the book.

Can you talk about the experience of discovering fragments A 821 and A 821a?

I’d love to. I tell this story in my essay “Itineraries of Escape,” and, I have to warn you, it sounds like a fairy tale from the archives!

I was in Amherst researching the poems and other writings Dickinson had pinned together. In some cases, all the evidence that’s left is the very tiny pinholes; in other cases (at least in the 1990s, when I was first looking at them), the pins were still in place. This was so for A 821/821a. When I opened up the acid-free envelope, I saw this exquisite document inside. I swear it seemed to rise out of the envelope and take flight! This can’t have happened, I realize, but it looked just like a bird to me, and the handwriting—both the writing itself and the way it was deployed over the page—imparted to the manuscript a kind of motion. Even to read it requires that we rotate the text. And which direction we’re supposed to read in—well, I don’t know.

We could read the text like this: “Clogged | only with | Music, like | the Wheels of | Birds - [turn MSS 90 degrees to the right] Afternoon and | the West and | the gorgeous | nothings | which | compose | the | sunset | keep [pinned corner] their high | Appoint | ment”

But we could rotate the text 360 degrees and read the lines backwards: “– Afternoon and | the West and | the gorgeous | nothings | which | compose | the | sunset | keep [pinned corner] their high | Appoint | ment” [turn MSS 90 degrees to the left] "Clogged | only with | Music, like | the Wheels of | Birds –”

There are so many astonishing things about this manuscript.

First, there is the question of how it was composed: all at once, at different times, in fragments. The handwriting differs depending on which sector of the document you are looking at, suggesting perhaps that it wasn’t composed in one sitting, although it could have been…. And the boundary lines in the manuscript also create a kind of physical caesura that gets repeated in the lines—where there is also a kind of braking action, or a kind of leap across the boundary. Caesura and syncope. We hear the grammar of discontinuity.

Second, there is the way it was assembled—in the manner of a collage. It’s made up of two sections of envelope. The larger piece is the inside of the back of an envelope, the address face of which has been torn away. The smaller piece is the triangular corner of an envelope seal. A pin once held them together….

Third, there is the very delicate center fold in the document—a fold that bisects the document and makes it appear like a kind of diptych. We don’t know who folded it—if Dickinson did or if it was folded later. But at some moment in time, the fold became part of the manuscript and it determined how the reader opened it—how the text was revealed. The suddenness of the message seems to me related to the document’s unfolding.

Fourth, there’s the mysterious presence on A 821 of other sets of pinholes. Was this document pinned to other documents we haven’t yet identified?

Fifth, there’s the message it records and that flashes by us: a message about how day falls into night; a message about the moment when the world is overtaken by—engulfed in—birdsong. It’s a message—I’d call it a poem—about the instantaneous translation from one condition into another, an essentially ecstatic experience.

Sixth, there’s the document’s past and its future(s). These lines, or variants of them, appear in three drafts of a letter Dickinson was writing to Helen Hunt Jackson in 1885. Dickinson’s letter—probably a response to Hunt Jackson’s earlier message, sent from California, about her broken leg—is abandoned when Dickinson learns that Hunt Jackson has died. It’s not known which text came first: the letter or the fragment. That is, we can’t be sure whether the text on A 821 was integrated into the letter, or whether, when the letter was abandoned, Dickinson “released” the fragment from it. Whatever happened, A 821 does migrate beyond the letter into a freer air.

And finally, we should know that there’s a variant of this fragment, A 822, which was also composed by pinning. “It is very still in the world now - Thronged only with Music like the Decks of Birds and the Seasons take their hushed places like figures in a Dream –”

For me, A 821 / A 821a, composed on the reverse of the empty, unaddressed envelope, no longer the container for a message but the message itself, will always be a trope for Dickinson’s late, contrapuntal communications, in which “arrival” is only ever another name for “departure.”

There are countless ways of reading this fragment. But when I read it—when I see it—it always seems to be en route to the outermost edges of Dickinson’s oeuvre—and maybe out of this world.

You’ve mentioned that time and history imprint on documents. Can you talk a bit about that?

The envelope poems are a special case, I think. When the envelopes were just envelopes, carrying the original messages someone sealed into them, they were literally supposed to travel across time and space in order to find their recipient. Sometimes they bear stamps issued from a particular year, or postmarks that tell us what time—sometimes what hour—they passed through a particular place on their journey. And of course, many are marked by the damages—torn seals, etc. They are beautiful and fallen cultural artifacts. Beautiful because they are fallen.

When Dickinson turned the envelopes into a space for writing, she changed their relationship to time and space. For a few moments, while we’re reading them, they seem to stop time. But then, when we get to the end of the reading, we see that they’re already departed for the future—futures.

Why do you think there is so much interest in Dickinson at this time?

Well, I think people have always been interested in Dickinson! My father read Dickinson’s poems to me when I was a little girl—and he wasn’t a literary man at all. It’s just that something in Dickinson moved him deeply. At the end of his life, he returned to her. We used to exchange letters the entire text of which consisted of lists of first lines of Dickinson poems. I think he was trying to communicate something to me. It’s a message I will keep forever. I imagine that many people feel the way my father did.

But I do think there’s a reason why reading these poems Dickinson recorded on envelopes in the latter days of the 19th century seems like such an urgent project at this moment in the 21st century.

There’s a new connection. Our obsessive seeking through the new technologies available to us—the most pervasive of which is, of course, the Internet—to collapse the distance between private and public, between inner thought and outer word, even between self and other—began at the close of the 19th century, when, as media historian John Durham Peters observes, we first “defined ourselves in terms of our ability to communicate with each other.” While we exist seemingly at the end of this age, Dickinson lived at its beginnings. In her century, the advent of tele-phenomena such as the telegraph and, later, the telephone, like the advent of the Internet in our own age, seemed to open up the potential to breach the barriers of time and space.

One of the uncanniest documents in the constellation of Dickinson’s writings on envelopes is a Western Union Telegraph blank. While the urgent message it conveyed has long since been lost, the poems that take its place—“Glass was | the Street - | in Tinsel | Peril” and “It came his | turn to beg --,” appear to translate the electrical pulses of the unrecoverable bulletin into new messages associating speed and shock.

But the grammatical breakdown and cancellation of the final words of the poems is also a sharp reminder that transmissions in this world are often asymmetrical and full of gaps. The very century that first experienced these unprecedented transformations in the forms of human contact also bore witness to the new and frightening horizons of incommunicability that still haunt us today. Not only the telegraph office but also the Dead Letter Office came into being in the 19th century, when it was not uncommon for the clerks of this strange agency to handle as many as 23,000 pieces of “dead” mail daily. “The media,” as Friedrich Kittler has remarked, “yield ghost phenomena.”

Today, the Dead Letter Office—renamed, in Orwellian fashion, the Mail Recovery Center—still exists. In 2012, the very year The Gorgeous Nothings first saw light, more than 90 million items ended up in this office—undeliverable as addressed. If we add to this the estimated billions of emails lost without a trace each day, we might wonder if, rather than becoming ever more closely connected, we are more drifting toward greater and greater states of disconnection.

A message enclosed in an envelope, or a poem inscribed upon it and prepared for sending over miles or millennia, or an email sent into thin air, is not a bit or byte of information but an archive of longings. And to send a signal at a distance, it must be kept from dying along the way. Dickinson knew and experienced this before we did. She knew, too, that the interval separating the writer of a message from the addressee—whether seconds, hours, days, or years—is indeterminate and may be(come) infinite, and that we can never verify the degree to which what is transmitted matches what is received.

And still, she wrote. Her late envelope writings, scattered by the winds of the future, intercepted by unknown and invisible readers, remind us of the contingency, transience, vulnerability, and hope cathected in all her messages and in all of our varied replies.

Originally Published: October 17, 2013

Trust me on this. Emily Dickinson was the greatest female poet to have ever lived. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/lear...e/243866#guide

Rae Armantrout: “Our Nature”
How did you become who you are?

BY STEPHEN BURT
Look at an old picture of yourself—a candid group photo is best, but a posed head shot or even a painting will do. How would you have described yourself back then? Would you describe yourself the same way now? How much do you have in common with the person whose portrait you see? Did you want to stand out? Can you feel proud, special, melancholy, or just resigned when you realize how much you have grown up and changed? In “Our Nature,” Rae Armantrout pursues such questions in her characteristically terse, harsh style.

An Armantrout poem can make no claim, and pursue no query, without trying to undermine its own terms: under the patient pressure of her short lines, key words in this poem, such as “nature” and even “latest,” can seem to come apart from their usual meanings, even as we come apart from our previous selves. Like most of her poems, “Our Nature” invites us to seek ironies and uncover the dubious axioms under each phrase. It also stands out, among those poems, for the open pathos of its ending, which addresses the life of an ambitious artist, and perhaps also the afterlife of an art movement, even while it asks about the changes that can pry any of us apart from our friends.

The poem begins with a look at an old image, or perhaps a general claim about the images that remain in our minds:

The very flatness
of portraits
makes for nostalgia
in the connoisseur.

All pictures are “flat” compared to real life, though some revel in their flatness, while others disguise it; what could be flat, in particular, about a portrait, and why would that “flatness” provoke “nostalgia”?

A portrait presents one moment, in space and in time: it is thus “flat” compared to the four-dimensional (in time and space) extent of a life, and looking back over that life might well prompt “nostalgia.” But to be “flat” or two-dimensional is also to look unreal. Is all portraiture unrealistic, in words or in visual art? Are all our mental portraits “unrealistic” as well, turning evolving personalities into all too comprehensible objects, as if we could possess the people we knew?

Considered thoroughly enough, do our ideas about people dissolve, as a picture dissolves or loses focus, when looked at for long? The second stanza, like a second take or a second look at the same picture, enacts that dissolution, with help from puns:

Here’s the latest
little lip of wave
to flatten
and spread thin.

Here a person’s “little lip” becomes the edge of a wave. Armantrout, who has always lived on the West Coast (in San Diego and in northern California), once censured another poet for comparing the sea to beads, since “the ocean can resemble a vertical sequence of discrete, solid objects in almost no way imaginable.” “Our Nature” seems to assert that we, too, are less like “discrete, solid objects” than our habits—and other poets’ “portraits”—assume. Our impressions of the people we think we know are more like a series of low waves, coming at us and then, usually, falling away. That image of liquid succession (“the latest” impression, and then something later still) gains force and irony from its contrast with the self-contained, solid, “hard” stanza in which it rests.

If the poem ended there it would be a cryptic rebuke, reminding us with a dry, uneasy authority that people always change. But Armantrout has more to say. Let’s say / it” becomes a hinge on which the poem turns, leaving the self-contained, pronoun-less quatrains behind. In their stead, we find one extended sentence, broken into one- and two-line bits, about a group of friends or allies who stuck together long enough to share adventures and to establish a “loyalty” later overruled, or contradicted, by the ambitions of its members (“our infatuation / with our own fame”).

Earlier Armantrout described everyone; now she speaks primarily of an “us,” who might be her generation, or her friends, or her political and artistic allies. The figure in Armantrout’s poem, one of the people included in her pronoun “we,” wants to show inner consistency as well as moral worth (we might say, encompassing both, that she wants to show character). But she is betrayed by her nature: “our nature,” human nature, or the nature of art, which undermine whatever character they construct. It is the nature of artists and their “gang” to strive for eminence, even at the cost of disconnection, as it is the nature of youthful “gangs” to grow apart. Outlaws of the Old West, quick on the draw, like the guerrilla movements of more recent decades, sometimes prided themselves on how they could “blend in // with the peasantry,” escaping the law. Remembering their subterfuges, Armantrout also invokes bands of youth, in schools or in street gangs, whose loyalty to one another cannot last, since it conflicts with their members' desire to get ahead in the adult world. (The young W.H. Auden, too, wrote that “love” required the “death of the old gang.”)

It’s tempting to associate Armantrout’s “old gang” with the real people who became her friends and allies early in her career: the Language writers, named after the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, one of several small journals from the 1970s (others include Hills and This) whose young, left-wing contributors declared their opposition to first-person lyric, to traditional narrative, and to any poems that emulated clear prose. Other Language writers included, on the West Coast, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Bob Perelman, and in New York City, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein.

It is hard to read “Our Nature,” which comes from Armantrout’s book Veil (2001), without thinking about how Language writing, with its sometime promise of ego-less investigation, of radical anti-subjective critique, actually became (for better and worse) a name for a group of sometimes superb individual poets and poems. Armantrout recently collaborated with nine other Language writers on The Grand Piano (2006–10), “an experiment in collective autobiography” that tells the story of their West Coast scene. She seems, in retrospect, essential to that scene, though she did not publish prolifically in the early years, when she ran the reading series that gave The Grand Piano its name. And yet she admits, “I spent most of the 70s wondering whether I was in or out of the new nexus [of the Bay Area avant-garde]. (In that way it was a little bit like junior high.)." She remembers asking, at that time, "What was this new poetics that later came to be known as ‘language poetry’ and was I part of it or not?”

For a writer of Armantrout’s skeptical temperament, emerging from a shared movement or moment, the desire to stand out—though perhaps part of “our nature”—must have been especially vexed and vexing. Her poems remain ambivalent about ambition, as her halting manner—the matter of this self-critical poem, with its silenced “fast gun”—might imply. Yet they stay ambivalent about loyalty, too, since loyalty can discourage critical thought. Hopes for group belonging, no less than aspirations to singularity, make Armantrout ask herself how she knows what she knows, and what her wishful thinking might conceal. “I do wonder,” she asked in The Grand Piano, “how much we, ‘language poets,’ identify with and/or objectify one another.”

Readers who single out Armantrout among other Language writers often notice her links to traditions of lyric poetry, that is, to brief poems whose singularities of sound represent a single voice, a single speaker, a putatively unique inward life. Writing in the New Yorker in 2010, when Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize, Dan Chiasson claimed that Armantrout “takes the basic premises of Language writing somewhere they were never intended to go: towards … a single individual’s … uniquely broken heart.” We may hear in this poem, with its rueful plural (“we,” not “I”), anticipatory reaction to such praise.

Yet Armantrout’s lines in “Our Nature” do not fit just one movement or moment, nor do they confine themselves to one art. How can we all succeed together in an enterprise where individuality and unique achievement is held out as the goal and the prize? And what if that enterprise is not art, but life? Most of us want to be “singled out” or noticed in some way, even if we do not try to write new kinds of poems; most of us also want, or at one time wanted, to stand with our peers, to keep our friends, to stay close.

We rarely get both; sometimes we get neither one. That broader disappointment informs Armantrout’s lines too: they end up with something like a tragic sense of how we grow up, itself the kind of sense sometimes, and wrongly, denied to the densely suggestive and demanding poetic traditions from which her style arose.

And yet the word “nature,” repeated in the penultimate line, should put us on alert, since Armantrout’s poems so frequently (as she has put it) “examine claims to naturalness and objectivity carefully to find out what or who is being suppressed.” Whose nature is ours? Was it always ours? Who are “we”? Should we resign ourselves to the alienating consequence of our ambitions, as inevitable as waves on sand, or can we construct some better choice?

Armantrout elsewhere likens her poems’ fitful movement to the mythical worm Ouroborous, which ate its own tail. Punning lines from her poem “Falling: I” warn us not to believe the stories we tell ourselves: “To swallow your own tail— // or tale— / is no longer // an approved / form of transportation.” It does not say what we should swallow, nor how we should transport ourselves, instead. Similarly, the ending of “Our Nature,” having pointed out “our infatuation,” leaves us with no clear place to stand, no more reliable substitute for the fallacies and hypocrisies, the cognitive and emotional mistakes, that Armantrout’s melancholy juxtapositions diagnose. Instead, the idea of a person with one nature, capable of sitting for a unique portrait, falls down when we try to make it explain “our nature,” to say why we do what we do.

Armantrout’s poems work hard not to settle on stable answers to the questions they raise. Be true to yourself, be yourself, pursue your own nature: Armantrout’s friable phrases cast some suspicion on those all-American instructions, whether or not we can learn to live without them. Her memoir True (1997) sets her desire to escape her cliché-ridden blue-collar childhood against her own suspicion about the stories of artists’ escapes: “Somehow my life was leading me to the conclusion that received opinion was my enemy,” she writes, adding, “I’m afraid, now, that I’m making my own myth.” We may not be able to live without myths, but we should not let ourselves get trapped by them. Neither the myth of solidarity forever, nor the romance of the individual becoming herself at all costs, nor any heroic story of rebels defying old norms and creating great change in the arts, survives the careful scrutiny of Armantrout’s curt, melancholy, and chastened phrases, which ask instead how we can remain, or even become, the people that we think we are.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/246936

ESSAY
The Imaginative Man
C.S. Lewis’s first love was poetry, and it enabled him to write the prose for which he is remembered.

BY LAURA C. MALLONEE
The Imaginative Man
Image from The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
In 1926, at the height of modernism’s golden age, a young C.S. Lewis and a few of his friends decided to play a literary prank. As told in Alister McGrath’s clear-eyed biography, they wrote a spoof of T.S. Eliot’s poetry and submitted it for publication at The Criterion, where Eliot was editor. “My soul is a windowless façade,” the poem began, and went on to ruminate over the Marquis de Sade, upholstered pink furniture, and mint juleps. If the older poet took the bait and published the poem, Lewis, who was then 27 years old and a fellow at Magdalene College, would use the event “for the advancement of literature and the punishment of quackery.” If not, it might prove there was something more to modernist poetry than he thought.

But Eliot never answered Lewis’s letter, and looking back on the ruse now is like watching a mouse brazenly challenge a cat. Eliot was then at the pinnacle of his career, having already published Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922); the younger Lewis’s literary future was still nebulous. Eliot has been called the most important poet of the 20th century; few today are aware that Lewis, the mastermind behind The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote poetry at all. But poetry was his first love, and his devotion to the form will be officially honored this month with the unveiling of a monument at the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, 50 years after his death.



Why was Lewis’s poetry forgotten? It is not so much that he fell out of fashion as a poet as that he openly spurned the fashions of his day. Amid the tide of modernism, Lewis’s narrative and lyrical poetry addressed an already dwindling audience. “I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable,” he wrote in 1940. But while his poetry might have been overlooked, it was the generative force of his writing life, an idle wheel that enabled him to write the powerful prose for which he is remembered.

•



It was in the wake of tragedy that Lewis first encountered poetry in 1908. He was nine years old, and his mother was dying of cancer. One day, as she lay in a sick room, “Jack”—a nickname he adopted after a car killed the family dog, Jacksie—was roaming the family’s Belfast home when his eyes fell on one of his father’s books. He opened it to read from a translation of Tegner’s Drapa by Longfellow:

I heard a voice that cried
Balder the Beautiful
Is dead, is dead!
These strange lines pierced a deep nerve. In his 1955 autobiography, Surprised by Joy, which takes its title from Wordsworth’s 1815 poem, Lewis regarded that moment as seminal in his young life; the sensation that entered him was a fleeting joy of “sickening intensity” that he would seek in poetry from then on. His self became divided between an external persona and a “secret, imaginative life” that concerned itself primarily with joy, a self-perpetuating desire that “makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have.”

Just two weeks after his mother died, Jack was packed off to a series of bleak boarding schools in England, where these “stabs of Joy” became all the more crucial. Through readings of Robert Browning, William Morris, Percy Shelley, George MacDonald, Wordsworth, and Norse and Greek mythology, Jack escaped the grim world into which he had been cast, and he worked diligently at composing his own narrative verse. He was especially inspired by Homer’s Iliad, enthusing to a friend in 1914, “Those fine, simple, euphonious lines … strike a chord in one’s mind that no modern literature approaches.” His poetic self—what he called “the imaginative man”—had been hatched.

If Romantic poetry and myth occupied one hemisphere of his mind, the other was quickly giving way to a rationalism that, in his view, threatened their legitimacy. “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary, nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless,” he explained in Surprised by Joy. By 1916, the church-raised Lewis would write:

Come let us curse our Master ere we die,
For all our hopes in endless ruin lie
The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.
The poem is one of several angst-ridden rhymes drafted in a notebook he self-deprecatingly entitled Metrical Meditations of a Cod. Many of them appeared in his poetic debut, Spirits in Bondage (1919),which also included poems he wrote during the war. He had been accepted to Oxford’s University College in December, 1916, but the following April he enlisted in the army. In the fall, he was sent to the front in France. Among the poems he composed in the trenches was “Death in Battle,” his first publication outside a school journal when it appeared in February 1919. It ran in Reveille, a small magazine geared toward disabled veterans whose other contributors included Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. Though he wrote little else about these grim experiences, it seems probable that the harrowing sights the 20-year-old saw goaded his anger against an absent God—a tempest that rages throughout Spirits in Bondage.

Yet he never found acclaim as a war poet. Published just four years after Eliot’s now-iconic poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, appeared in Poetry, Lewis’s first collection was rooted in an exacting craft of meter and rhyme that had already become outmoded. Though it won him a flurry of attention at Oxford—where he returned as a student after the war—interest quickly faded. “Indeed the current literary set is one I could not afford to live in anyway,” he reassured himself, since “their tastes run rather to modernism….”

From a 21st-century vantage point, it is easy to view Lewis as simply a reactionary, rejecting what was new without attempting to understand it. Yet his aversion to the moderns was born out of love for Homer, Milton, Spenser, Shelley, and Yeats—writers considered challenging for contemporary readers. He genuinely feared that modernists were “unmaking language” and was zealous to defend a millennia-old tradition of rhyme, meter, and myth that filled his life with meaning. By isolating himself from the moderns, he fulfilled Shelley’s image of the poet as a nightingale, “who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”

Lewis soldiered on, even while expressing in his diary mounting anxieties about writing. When the London Mercury rejected a few poems in April 1922, he spent a restless night pondering whether he would be forced to give up poetry. On February 9, 1923, he was again kept awake by “gloomy thoughts” of failure—“one of those moments when one is afraid one may not be a great man after all.”

But it was Lewis’s instinct to kick against the goads. He had long been working on a narrative poem called Dymer and finally managed to publish it in September 1926—just months after his fruitless hoax on Eliot. An epic written in Chaucer’s rhyme royal, the poem—which McGrath calls the passion of Lewis’s life—was an aesthetic and ideological reflection of all the Belfast-born writer had come to be. Dymer investigated the temptations of fantasy, following the path of a young man who escapes a totalitarian reality to indulge in a dream world that kills him. But it too was a critical failure. After reading Dymer, an acquaintance told Lewis, “The metrical level is good, the vocabulary is large: but Poetry—not a line.”

Even as he floundered, Lewis continued critiquing Eliot and his ilk. In 1928, he wrote to his brother, “There is no longer any chance of discovering a long poem in English which will turn out to be just what I want and which can be added to the Faerie Queene, the Prelude, Paradise Lost, the Ring and the Book, The Earthly Paradise and a few others – because there aren’t any more.” By 1931 he had become an earnest Christian who believed art and literature should be “the handmaids of religious or at least moral truth,” a view that made him even less inclined to regard the modernists affectionately—or they him. (When Eliot himself converted in 1927, Virginia Woolf called him “dead to us all from this day forward.”)

Despite their newfound common ground, Lewis dubbed Eliot’s The Waste Land “infernal” in a 1935 letter, and in 1939 lamented, “I am more and more convinced that there is no future for poetry.” His scathing poem “The Country of the Blind,” penned decades later in 1951, describes moderns as having “blind mouths” incapable of understanding what words mean. In a letter written two years later to Joy Davidman, whom he would eventually marry, he pondered, “Twenty years ago I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return; but here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.”

It is only in his 1954 poem “A Confession”—which lifts a line from Eliot’s own Prufrock—that Lewis wryly expressed his resignation as a poet long out of step with his time. Describing himself as “that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom / A primrose was a yellow primrose,” he wrote,

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening—any evening—would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn't able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.
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It seems inevitable that Lewis’s contrarianism would lead him to become a critic. Throughout the nearly three decades he spent as an Oxford don—during which he became a close friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, who encouraged him as he funneled his love of verse into works of fiction—and later years as a professor at Cambridge, he focused much of his energy on the late Middle Ages. In his 1944 essay “On the Reading of Old Books,” Lewis condemned what he saw as the chronological snobbery of his day and argued for an “intimate knowledge of the past”:

Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.

Today, his perceptive critical studies remain highly regarded. The Allegory of Love (1936) revived scholarly interest in medieval narratives such as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942) is still one of the most valued introductions to the poem. “His work on Milton drew attention to an aspect of his poetry that had been neglected—how it sounded to its readers,” McGrath writes. “Lewis became acutely sensitive to the rhythm of the English language, whether poetry or prose. He never used a typewriter, explaining that the clattering of its keys destroyed his ‘sense of rhythm.’”

It was not through poetry but prose that Lewis finally found his audience, though it’s doubtful his prose would have been as powerful without his sharp poetic and critical instinct. The scholar Don W. King points to the writer’s “rich lyrical passages, vivid description; striking similes, metaphors and analogies; careful diction; and concern for the sound of words” in works ranging from science fiction to literary criticism. Alister McGrath observes, “Here we find one of the keys to his success as a writer—his ability to express complex ideas in simple language, connecting with his audience without losing elegance of expression.” The Chronicles of Narnia series is not easily forgotten by those who read it. The series has sold more than 100 million copies and has been translated into more than 40 languages.

It’s unsurprising that many of his later books—including Perelandra (1943), Surprised by Joy (1955), and Till We Have Faces (1956)—had early origins in verse. The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) not only began as a poem but also included several lyrical pieces within the narrative. Among these, “Because of Endless Pride” is a graceful rumination on the narcissism with which Lewis struggled as a writer. In the throes of vanity, the narrator is nearly dying of want when his eye catches a form in the mirror—

Who made the glass, whose light
Makes dark, whose fair
Makes foul, my shadowy form reflected there
That self-Love, brought to bed
of Love may die and bear
Her sweet son in despair.
Lewis never stopped writing poetry. He would write more than 200 lyrical poems, 81 of which were published before his death in 1963. Among the most touching of these are those written for his wife, Joy Davidman, whom he married late in life while she, like his mother, was dying of cancer. “All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you”—he admits in “As the Ruins Fall”—“I never had a selfless thought since I was born.” After her death, he mourned his loss in “Joys That Sting”:

To take the old walks alone, or not at all,
To order one pint where I ordered two,
To think of, and then not make, the small
Time-honoured joke (senseless to all but you);
Critics have since held varying views of Lewis’s poetry. He has been called “big enough to be worth laughing at” by the novelist Kingsley Amis, who also wrote that Lewis was someone he respected highly. Chad Walsh dubbed him an “almost poet,” and Charles Huttar called him a “minor” one. W.W. Robson has written that in some of Lewis’s poems he “touches greatness.” After a selection of his verse was published in 2002, the New York Times Book Review described his poems as taking “an important place in the Lewis canon,” while Thomas Howard gushed, “This is the best—the glorious best—of Lewis. For here, with the gemlike beauty and hardness that poetry alone can achieve, are his ideas about the nature of things that lay behind his writings."

In a letter addressed to the Milton Society of America, who honored him in 1954, Lewis offered hindsight on his own relationship to poetry:

The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic. It was he who made me first attempt (with little success) to be a poet. It was he who, in response to the poetry of others, made me a critic, and in defense of that response, sometimes a critical controversialist…. And it was of course he who has brought me, in the last few years, to write the series of Narnian stories for children….

Lewis’s poetry never came close to securing him the towering reputation of a titan such as Eliot, but he used his disappointments to begin anew, channeling his poetic sensibilities into prose works that enlarge the imaginations of all who read them. That he will now be honored in the same sacred space as Milton, Spenser, and—yes—even Eliot seems a fitting tribute—far greater than Lewis ever dreamed.



Originally Published: November 19, 2013