Posts Tagged poetry

“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand. ” ~ Plato

“Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.”  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

“The terms poetry and prose are incorrectly opposed to each other. Verse is, properly, the contrary of prose … and writing should be divided, not into poetry and prose, but into poetry and philosophy” ~ Rev William Enfield

“The whole history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one” ~ Schlegel

The war between poets and philosophers is an ancient one… for it is a war between reason and imagination. Philosophers think of poets – when they think of them at all – as unpredictable and highly unreliable fellows who too easily leap-frog over any obstacles that get in their way.

Poets think of philosophers as extremely dull fellows, slow to get a point and to get to a point.

On a beautiful autumn morning, a poem… not a philosophical treatise… seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Reddo 

The poem that once 
appeared in this space
is being re-drafted
and re-typed.

It will be re-posted
someday soon
at MontanaWriter.com.

Stay tuned!

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This is the seventh book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

More than any poet, I associate Auden with mountains because that is where I first seriously read him. I carried a volume of his selected poems into the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness when I worked trail crew there for the United States Forest Service during summers in the early 1980s. At nights, after everyone else went to sleep, I would lay in my sleeping bag with a flashlight balanced on my shoulder and read his poems long into the cool, clear night.

Later I read this book, Dyer’s Hand – which I think I picked up at a used bookstore near the Toledo Art Museum – when I was living briefly back in Montana after I had decided to no longer be a Lutheran pastor. I read it while I was studying Irish Literature and fly tying.

As a poet, Auden is one of a handful of 20th century poets that can truly be called great. As a critic, Auden is inspiring, insightful, imaginative, and quotable as hell. There is no critic of poetry that I would recommend above Auden.

Opening now the battered paperback book I first read more than 25 years ago, I look at lines I underlined and margin notes I made in those long-gone mountain days. Flipping pages, I recognize themes and trajectories that have guided my reading and writing life. Themes quite familiar to regular readers of MontanaWriter.

There are so many fine quotes, I do not know where to stop. In the end, I include quotes from just a few essays here. Another time, down the road perhaps, I will look at a few more.

In the North Country, it is full Autumn now. The trees we see every day are turning or have already turned. The days are dry and the sky that vivid blue that only those of us who live in the land of four seasons will ever truly know. I sit on my deck reading Auden… and the long years melt away…. and the flat country I inhabit now melts away. I am in the mountains again.

“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” (cf. “Foreword”)

“To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct….” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“A poet cannot read another poet, nor a novelist another novelist, without comparing their work to his own. His judgements as he reads are of this kind: My God! My Great Grandfather! My Uncle! My Enemy! My Brother! My imbecile Brother!” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid. Moreover, unlike a scientist, he is usually even more ignorant of what his colleagues are doing than is the general public. A poet over thirty may still be a voracious reader, but it is unlikely much of what he reads is modern poetry.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“Every writer would rather be rich than poor, but no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgement he respects.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“Writers, poets especially, have an odd relation to the public because their medium, language, is not, like the paint of the painter or the notes of the composer, reserved for their use but is the common property of the linguistic group to which they belong.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“The degree of excitement which a writer feels during the process of composition is as much an indication of the value of the final result as the excitement felt by a worshiper is an indication of the value of his devotions, that is to say, very little indication.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“No writer can ever judge exactly how good or bad a work of his may be, but he can always know, not immediately perhaps, but certainly in a short while whether something he has written is authentic….” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“… whenever English poets have felt that the gap between poetic and ordinary speech was growing to wide, there has been a stylistic revolution to bring them closer again.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“Nothing is worse than a bad poem which was intended to be great.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“A young poet may be conceited about his good taste, but he is under no illusion about his ignorance. He is well aware of how much poetry there is that he would like but of which he has never heard, and that there are learned men who have read it. His problem is knowing which learned man to ask, for it is not just more good poetry that he wants to read, but more of the kind he likes. He judges a scholarly or critical book less by the text than by the quotations, and all his life, I think, when he reads a work of criticism, he will find himself trying to guess what taste lies behind the critic’s judgement.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“Whatever his defects, a poet at least thinks a poem more important than anything which can be said about it….” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“…it is from the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet’s impulse to write a poem arises.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“… unless the poet sacrifices his feelings completely to the poem so that they are no longer his but the poem’s, he fails.” (cf. essay “The Virgin & The Dynamo”)

“A poet has not only to educate himself as a poet, he has also to consider how he is going to earn a living. Ideally, he should have a job which does not in any way involve the manipulation of words.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“The poet cannot understand the function of money in modern society because for him there is no relation between subjective value and market value.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“… every artist feels himself at odds with modern civilization.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. So long as artists exist, making what they please and think they ought to make, even if it is not terribly good, even if it appeals to only a handful of people, they remind Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous numbers, that Homo Laborans is also Homo Ludens.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“…every artist who happens also to be a Christian wishes he could be a polytheist….” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“To the imagination, the sacred is self-evident.” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“A poet who calls himself a Christian cannot but feel uncomfortable when he realizes that the New Testament contains no verse (except in the apocryphal, and gnostic, Acts of John), no prose….” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“As Rudolf Kassner has pointed out: ‘The difficulty about the God-man for the poet lies in the Word being made Flesh. This means that reason and imagination are one. But does not Poetry, as such, live from their being a gulf between them?” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

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This is the sixth book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

According to an article at Wikipedia, Eliot is “arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.” I do know if this is true, but I do know that his two most famous poems, “Wasteland” and “Prufrock,” were unarguably the most dissected-and-discussed-to-death poems of the 20th century English Major classroom. If that is the case in the 21st century, I do not know. I hope it is not. Eliot is too good a poet to be left in pieces on university classroom floors.

Eliot as critic is as thorough as you would expect a former banker to be. “On Poetry and Poets” shows Eliot as critic at his best… and at his best he is one of the best critics of the 20th century or any century for that matter.

According to the usual note on the inside front cover, I first read this in December 1987. In the winter of 1987-88 I was living in a very small studio apartment near downtown St. Paul just a half a block from the cathedral and working in downtown Minneapolis. I would have read this book then on the bus to and from work and in the evenings in a battered and crooked lazy-boy recliner I still count as one of my all-time favorite reading chairs.

The paperback volume is beginning to fall apart. Turning pages I hear the cracking of glue long gone brittle. A corner of the cover is missing and the pages are brown with age. Purchased almost 25 years ago at a used-bookstore it shows its age and its heavy use.

I look now at the lines I highlighted and underlined all those years ago and I am reminded of why Eliot matters.

“… I think it is important that every people should have its own poetry, not simply for those who enjoy poetry… but because it actually makes a difference to the society as a whole.” (cf. essay “The Social Function of Poetry”)

“…poetry has primarily to do with the expression of feeling and emotion… feeling and emotion are particular, whereas thought is general. It is easier to think in a foreign language than to feel it it. Therefore no are is more stubbornly national than poetry.” (cf. essay “The Social Function of Poetry”)

“We may say that the duty of the poet, as poet, is only indirectly to his people: his direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve.” (cf. essay “The Social Function of Poetry”)

“…the poet, at the back of his mind, if not as his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind he wants to write.” (cf. essay “The Music of Poetry”)

“No poetry, of course, is ever exactly the same speech that the poet talks and hears: but it has to be in such relation to the speech of his time that the listener or reader can say ‘that is how I should talk if I could talk poetry’.” (cf. essay “The Music of Poetry”)

“[The practicing poet] is concerned less with the author than with the poem;and with the poem in relation to his own age. He asks: Of what use is the poetry of this poet to poets writing today.” (cf. essay “Milton II”)

“…it is [Milton’s] ability to give a perfect and unique pattern to every paragraph, such that the full beauty of the line is found in its context, and his ability to work in larger musical units than any other poet – that is to me the most conclusive evidence of Milton’s supreme mastery.” (cf. essay “Milton II”)

“When we see exactly what [Byron] was doing, we can see that he did it as well as it can be done.” (cf. essay “Byron”)

“As a tale-teller we must rate Byron very high indeed: I can think of none other since Chaucer who has greater readability, with the exception of Coleridge who Byron abused and from who Byron learned a great deal.” (cf. essay “Byron”)

“Of Byron one can say, as of no other English poet of his eminence, that he added nothing to the language, that he discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning of individual words. I cannot think of any other poet of his distinction who might so easily have been an accomplished foreigner writing English.” (cf. essay “Byron”)

“… unlike many writers, [Yeats] cared more for poetry than for his own reputation as a poet or his picture of himself as a poet.” (cf. essay “Yeats”)

“The point is, that in becoming more Irish, not in subject-matter but in expression, [Yeats] became at the same time universal.” (cf. essay “Yeats”)

“For the young can see [Yeats] as a poet who in his work remained in the best sense always young, who even in one sense became young as he aged. But the old, unless they are stirred to something of the honesty with oneself expressed in the poetry, will be shocked by such a revelation of what a man really is an remains.” (cf. essay “Yeats”)

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This is the fifth book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

Dana Gioia began his literary career as an outsider. Like two poets he admires – Wallace Steven and Ted Kooser – Gioia did not follow the usual route into poetry. He did not get an MFA. He did not get a university job teaching writing.  Rather got an MBA from business school and headed out into corporate America.

This different road-taken influences his poetry and his critical eye. It gives him ever the soul, ear, and eye of the literary outsider. It is his great strength as a critic and the place he stands in his poetry.

The advantages of the establishment poet are obvious – a network of friends and colleagues to promote your work, more direct avenues into publishing, an outwardly intellectual and literary milieu – and yet there is a sense by many of us that poetry has become increasingly a hollow thing without real substance. Gioia points to an alternative to the literary establishment, which like all establishments inevitably rots from the center outward. Poetry has become marginalized in our culture because it has largely been removed from our true public squares into the ivy-covered courtyards and sterile classrooms of universities where it is dissected and studied and taught… a lifeless, soulless body now in pieces on a slab.

According to my usual notes on the inside front cover, I first read Can Poetry Matter? in the spring of 1997. In 1997, I was still a young man in my mid 30s and still doing the at-home dad thing and freelancing. I still remember the joy of finding someone else thinking of poetry in the same way I was. Saying things that I was saying and writing. It was like finding a kindred soul

I open the volume and look at lines I highlighted and underlined almost 15 years ago :

“We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, “I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself,”…but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.” (cf. quote from Robert Bly from book introduction)

“The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man’s happiness.” (cf. quote from Wallace Stevens from book introduction)

“Poetry teachers, especially at the high-school and under-graduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized.” (cf. book introduction)

“Ultimately the mission of the university has little to do with the mission of the arts, and this long cohabitation has had an enervating effect on all the arts but especially on poetry and music.” (cf. essay “Notes on the New Formalism”)

“Jeffers wrote about ideas – not teasing epistemologies, learned allusions, or fictive paradoxes – but big, naked, howling ideas that no reader can miss.” (cf. essay “Strong Counsel”)

“[Weldon] Kee’s work demands a critic who shares his belief in the desperate importance of poetry, and most critics – both in and outside of the universities – don’t believe that poetry matters all that much to anyone’s life.” (cf. essay “The Loneliness of Weldon Kees)

“The challenge for a young poet is to reconcile the world with the imagination.” (cf. essay “The Loneliness of Weldon Kees)

“Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently.” (cf. essay on Ted Kooser called “The Anonymity of the Regional Poet”)

“A poet’s sense of his own direction might sharpen best if he is not forced to defend or discuss it every day in a classroom or café.” (cf. essay “Business and Poetry”)

“For some poets at least, long silences are an essential stage in their creative growth.” (cf. essay “Business and Poetry”)

“…working in nonliterary careers taught them [Stevens, Eliot, Kooser,...] a lesson too few American writers learn – that poetry is only one part of life, that there are some things more important than writing poetry.” (cf. essay “Business and Poetry”)

“There are only two ways in which a writer can become important… to write a great deal, and have his writing appear everywhere, or to write very little… I write very little.” (cf. Eliot quote from essay “Bourgeois in Bohemia”)

“Bly’s weaknesses as a translator underscore his central failings as a poet. He is simplistic, monotonous, insensitive to sound, enslaved by literary diction, and pompously sentimental.” (cf. essay “The Successful Career of Robert Bly”)

“In poetry sentimentality represents the failure of language to carry the emotional weight an author intends.” (cf. essay “The Successful Career of Robert Bly”)

“If one is prepared to approach [John Ashbery] uncritically, he is very entertaining, but his work must not be read so much as overheard – like an attractive voice talking at another table.” (cf. essay “Short Views”)

“[Jared Carter] who waited forty-two years to publish his first book must have often wondered if it was worthwhile to bide his time and perfect his craft. The answer in [his] case is an unqualified yes.” (cf. essay “Short Views”)

“…for most real poets above the age of thirty-five the strongest influence comes from their own previous work.” (cf. essay “The Difficult Case of Howard Moss”)

“A poet will be judged by his best poems because posterity will forget the others. Their power, range, freshness, and – there is no way of avoiding it – their word-for-word-perfection will determine the author’s reputation.” (cf. essay “The Difficult Case of Howard Moss”)

“‘True poetic history,’ Bloom has asserted, ‘is the story of how poets as poets have suffered from other poets.’” (cf. essay “Tradition and an Individual Talent”)

“Perhaps a poet can never know too much, but a poem can.” (cf. essay “Tradition and an Individual Talent”)

“Young writers not only need to learn their craft well. They must also shape their values and aspirations to resist the manifold temptations to write cheaply or dishonestly in the fashionable ways. They need to develop a character strong enough to withstand both failure and success.” (cf. essay “The Example of Elizabeth Bishop”)

“If poetry hoped to get at the heart of things, it needed more subtlety and precision, more openness to experience and less reliance on gross generalities…. This utilitarian aesthetic transformed poetry into a secular version of devotional verse.” (cf. essay “The Example of Elizabeth Bishop”)

“Ultimately Bishop reminded one of the poet’s duty to be true to his or her own sensibilty and experience, no matter how deeply at odds they might be with pervailing fashions.” (cf. essay “The Example of Elizabeth Bishop”)

Regular readers of MontanaWriter will recognize in these lines themes and ideas that I return to often. Looking back it is easy to see why this book resonated with me so much then… and why it still does.

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This is the fourth book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

Robert Frost is the most American of all American poets. He is American in subject, sound, and sensibility. It is his great strength and his greatest weakness. While Whitman’s propheticness transcended his American-ness, Frost can make no such claim to a transcendent universality. In the end he remains Poet Americanus.

That is what makes this volume of essays by three great, non-American poets, so interesting. For American poets, Frost resides in our very bones, like the sounds of  rivers, and highways, and wind in trees, and the voices of American birds and American words spoken in coffee shops and local bars and across fences at harvest time.

Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott are three of the finest contemporary world poets. The essays that form Homage to Robert Frost have their root in a seminar that was done on Frost at College International de Philosophie in Paris. In Paris – the most self-consciously unAmerican of all cities – three non-American poets discussed Frost and his poetry. The result is wonderful.

While American readers and poets always approach Frost from the inside… Brodsky, Heaney, and Walcott, by necessity, come to Frost from without. This enables them to hear him in a way an American reader cannot. This, ultimately, is the greatest value of Homage to Robert Frost.

According to my usual note on the inside front cover of the book, I first read Homage to Robert Frost in late fall of 1996. In the fall of 1996, we were no longer living in our little house in St. Paul but would have just moved into suburban Bloomington. I would still have been freelancing as a writer and editor of training materials and bible studies. During the days I would have been doing the at-home dad thing, and on some evenings I would have been working at a telemarketing job. I would have been reading Homage to Robert Frost during toddler nap times and while sitting in a cube waiting for inbound-sales calls to come in. As I have said elsewhere, the words of Brodsky, Heany and Walcott – and the the lines of Robert Frost – would have been helping me to keep my sanity, as poetry has always done for me.

Opening now the book, I read some lines I underlined and highlighted 15 years ago.

“When a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he encounters a tree, it’s a tree made familiar by history, to which its’ been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, lay down this or that law – something of that sort. A tree stands there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed bu unchanged by that encounter, returns to his in or cottage, finds his friends and family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Wheras when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up…. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock.” (cf. Brodsky’s essay “On Grief and Reason” paraphrasing Auden’s essay on Frost)

“With few exceptions, American poetry is essentially Virgilian, which is to say contemplative.” (cf. Brodsky’s essay “On Grief and Reason”)

“Frost believed… that individual venture and vision arose as a creative defense against emptiness, and that it was therefore possible that a relapse into emptiness would be the ultimate destiny of consciousness.” (cf. Heaney’s essay “Above the Brim”)

“Why is the favorite figure of American patriotism not paternal but avuncular? Because uncles are wiser than fathers.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“Frost is an autocratic poet rather than a democratic poet.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“… Yeats told Pound that A Boy’s Will was “the best poetry written in America for a long time.’ The judgement seems right.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“For interior recitation, usually of complete poems, not only of lines or stanzas, Frost and Yeats, for their rhythms and design, are the most memorable poets of the century.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“The poem does not obey linear time; it is, by its beligerance or its surrender, the enemy of time; and it is, when it is true, time’s conqueror, not time’s servant.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

As so often happens, Frost’s stature in American literature has diminished over time. It is more a “taking for granted” I think than a re-assessment. It is easy to take Frost for granted in the same way that it is easy to take for granted Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington. Sometimes it takes outsiders to remind us of what is most essential and best about America. Homage to Robert Frost accomplishes this beautifully,

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(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

As I have said on a numerous occasions, I have been surprised to discover that the thing I have come to enjoy most about this experiment I call MontanaWriter has been when someone I do not personally know has been moved in some way by something I have written to contact me. Whether they like what I have written or dislike it does not matter. What excites me is to think that a stranger has taken the time to read and respond. A writer needs an audience after all.

Recently I received an email from a reader who had stumbled upon MontanaWriter and my review of Wallace Stevens’ poem “Sigmund Freud Discovers the Sea Shell.” The gist of the email was that for all my talk about eliminating latinates from poetry I was “guilty” (her word) of using quite a number in both my poetry and in my poetry reviews.

She was particularly bothered by a term I “made up” (again, her words) in the Stevens’ review, textual duplexity. She said she googled the term and found only one other place it has ever been used, an article on Kierkegaard. “You insist that language needs to have shared meanings, yet you are apparently one of only two persons in the whole world to even pretend to know what ‘textual duplexity’ means. Are you using it ironically or hypocritically.”

My one word answer to that question would be: both. My three word response to the whole email would be: “guilty as charged.”

Duplex, according to online dictionaries has a number of meanings including:

1. having two principal elements or parts: double, two-fold
2. A house divided into two living units or residences, usually having separate entrances
3. allowing telecommunication in opposite directions simultaneously

The term textual duplexity is rooted in all the meanings of “duplex.” Language, indeed all human interaction, is always at least two-fold and is, by definition, always simultaneous two-way communication.

Words carry multiple meanings. Another (admittedly more poetical) way to say this is: many meanings “inhabit the house” of a single word.  In a poem, these houses – duplexes actually… dwellings of multiple meanings – form streets, and blocks, and neighborhoods, and communities of meanings. These meanings simultaneously interconnect with one another and with the writer and the reader of any poem… any work of art. The term textual duplexity then, seems to me to describe the process as well as any term I could come up with.

I sent an email back to the reader, explaining how I had come up with the term and thanking her for reading what I had read so carefully. I also let her know that I am quite open to any and all other terms or metaphors that could better describe how I imagine poetry to function.

I will keep the readers of MontanaWriter posted when, and if, I find a better term or metaphor. In the meantime, I am going to live with the hypocrisy of my latinates and continue to use the term “textual duplexity.”

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Ted Kooser, like Wallace Stevens, made his real money as a vice-president of an insurance company. Rather than spending his days, as most poets do now, teaching writing to MFA students, Kooser spent his working a real job.  The fact that Kooser, like Stevens before him, has been able to create some of the most unique poetry of our time tells us something significant about poetry, and about writing… something that universities and tenured poetry teachers do not want us to know. Pay no attention to that man writing alone on his own behind the curtain.

Poetry depends on community… but not the kind of community that MFA programs provide or writer’s groups. Poetry depends on a living community: a community of dead poets, living words, and future readers.

Kooser became a poet by reading and writing poetry, by interacting and wrestling with poems and words, some of his own but mostly the poems and words of dead poets. Poets do not work alone in vacuums, they work always within the context of those who came before… especially the giants like Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Yeats. Once internalized, the words of great poets become living words shaping language and ear, the very way we breathe.

When the poet sits down to write then, he or she does not sit alone… even in an empty room. There is a crowd at his shoulder (those who have gone before) and there is another crowd in front of him ( future readers). The poet always has a reader in mind. Language needs relationship, because words find their meaning only in relationship to an other.  Without a reader, a poet could eschew word-meaning  altogether because sensibility-meaning would not matter. A community of shared meaning is inherent in the poet-reader relationship.

Kooser and Stevens (and Blake and Dickinson…) remind us why the most unique poetry seems to be written by “poetic hermits”: because only the poet writing alone knows poetic solitude. Apart from contemporary groups and teachers and fellow students, the poetic hermit truly has a chance to wrestle with the poets who have come before, to internalize the words and poems of the great poets and be transformed by them, and to envision a new kind of reader for the new kind of poetry they are struggling to create.

In “Selecting a Reader,” Kooser, who has always seemed to me, the most humble poet since Hopkins, touches upon the relationship between reader and poet in a unique way. The poet, alas needs the reader… but does the reader or the world really need the poet or his or her work?

Enjoy!

This is the third book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

In my mid-twenties, I spent a year reading all of Yeats books that I could at the time find in print. In my mind, I refer to it as my Yeats Year... though in reality it may have been closer to a year and a half.

I began by reading his Complete Poems cover to cover, then read volumes of his plays and prose works as I could find them: Essays and Introductions; Autobiographies; Mythologies; Explorations; Irish Myth, Legend and Folk Lore; Selected Plays; Complete Plays; A Vision; and volumes I have forgotten or lost over time. At the end of the year, I bought a newer used-copy of Complete Poems and read that again, cover to cover.

Since I was so immersed in Yeats and all things Yeatsian, that second read-through of the Complete Poems was simply magical. If there were “world enough and time,” that is the way I would read every important poet. In heaven – if there truly is a heaven and it is the way I like to think about it and I get to it – I will have “world enough and time” to read poetry that way… to do many things in a mindful and unhurried way.

According to my usual note on the inside front cover, I started reading Essays and Introductions in March of 1985. At that time I was living in Saginaw, Michigan. I spent my days as pastor of a small inner-city congregation, running an after-school program at a community center, and providing extra pastoral help for a large downtown congregation. I was busy… but I was single and filled with energy. I worked and I read.

By March of 1985, I knew I was going to leave the ministry. I probably also knew that I was going to stay at that congregation until at least August, or until they found a replacement (I ended up being there until October). I had no idea, though… as I still have no idea… of what I was going to do next.

I would have been reading Essays and Introductions then in my small congregation-provided apartment with borrowed furniture in an old Victorian home on the “white-side” of the river (my congregation was on the “black-side’). The copy I read, and still own, I purchased in a used-book store in Ann Arbor. The previous owner… a student at the University of Michigan I have always assumed, an obviously a male by the handwriting… made a few notes on the inside front cover and underlined or highlighted a just few lines in the first essay only.

I open now the volume that has sat on my bookshelves now for 26 years and read again lines I underlined and highlighted what now seems like a life time ago. The spine is cracked, and pages falling loose. As I turn pages I hear and feel more glue giving way. A great treasure in an earthen vessel.

I read now the words I see. Lines written by one of greatest of all poets about poetry and art, about other poets and other artists, about Ireland and language.

“Whenever one finds a fine verse one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble and much pleasanter if we all could listen, friend by friend, lover by beloved.” (cf. essay “Speaking the Psaltery”)

“What was the good of writing a love song if the singer pronounced love ‘lo-0-o-o-o-ve,’ or even if he said ‘love,’ but did not give it the exact  place and weight in the rhythm?” (cf. essay “Speaking the Psaltery”)

“I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist.” (cf. essay “Magic”)

“[William Morris'] vision is true because it is poetical, because we are a little happier when looking at it….” (cf. essay “The Happiest of the Poets”)

“[Shelley] believed imagination a kind of death; and he could hardly have helped perceiving that an image that has transcended particular time and place becomes a symbol, passes beyond death, as it were, and becomes a living soul.” (cf. essay “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry”)

“… there is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, for wisdom first speaks in images, and that this one image, if he would but brood over it his life long, would lead his soul, disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb and flow of the world, into that far household where the undying gods await all whose souls have become simple as flame, whose bodies have become quiet as an agate lamp.” (cf. essay “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry”)

“There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these men…. He announced the religion of art…” (cf. essay “William Blake and the Imagination”)

“I care not whether a man is good or bad, all I care is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go put off holiness and put on intellect.” (cf. essay “Blake’s Illustrations to Dante”)

“Religious and visionary people, monks and nuns, medicine-men and opium-eaters, see symbols in their trances; for religious and visionary thought is about perfection and the way to perfection; and symbols are the only things free enough from all bonds to speak of perfection.” (cf. essay (“Symbolism in Painting”)

“… I doubt indeed… that love itself would be more than an animal hunger but for the poet and his shadow the priest….” (cf. essay (“Symbolism in Painting”)

“The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation….” (cf. essay (“Symbolism in Painting”)

“Man has wooed and won the world, and has fallen weary, and not, I think, for time, but with a weariness that will not end until the last autumn, when the stars shall be blown away like withered leaves. He grew weary when he said, ‘These things that I touch and see and hear are alone real,’ for he saw them without illusion at last, and found them but air and dust and moisture. And now he must be philosophical above everything, even about the arts, for he can only return the way he came, and so escape from weariness, by philosophy. The arts arts, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not with things.” (cf. essay “The Autumn of the Body”)

“Three types of men have made all beautiful things, Aristocracies have made beautiful manners, because their place in the world puts them above the fear of life, and the countrymen have made beautiful stories and beliefs, because they have nothing to lose and so do not fear, and the artists have made all the rest, because Providence has filled them with recklessness. All these look backward to a long tradition, for, being without fear, they have held to whatever pleased them.” (cf. essay “Poetry and Tradition”)

“We artists have taken over-much to heart that old commandment about seeking the Kingdom of Heaven.” (cf. essay “Discoveries”)

“No playwright ever has made or ever will make a character that will follow us out of the theatre as Don Quixote follows us out of the book….” (cf. essay “Discoveries”)

“The imaginative writer differs from the saint in that he identifies himself – to the neglect of his own soul, alas! – with the soul of the world, and frees himself from all that is impermanent in that soul, an ascetic not of women and wine, but of the newspapers.” (cf. essay “Discoveries”)

“I think that before the religious change that followed on the Renaissance men were greatly preoccupied with their sins, and that to-day they are troubled by other men’s sins.” (cf essay “Art and Ideas”)

“Religion had denied the sacredness of an earth that commerce was about to corrupt and ravish, but when Spenser lived the earth had still its sheltering sacredness.” (cf. essay “Edmund Spenser”)

“A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness….” (cf. “A General Introduction for my Work”)

“Style is almost unconscious. I know what I have tried to do, little what I have done.” (cf. “A General Introduction for my Work”)

“I wanted all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung…. I have spent my life clearing from poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for the ear alone.” (cf. “A General Introduction for my Work”)

The last quote above sums up Yeats as a poet better than all the many volumes of critical study that have been written about him and his poetry. I close the volume again and place it reverently back upon the shelf. For a long time I sit looking outside… into the beautiful summer day.

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This is the second book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” The first book reviewed in this series was Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982-88 by Donald Hall. 

Seamus Heaney’s strength as a critic is his ear… his remarkable ear. It is what makes him our greatest living poet. Where Donald Hall (in Poetry and Ambition, and all his prose work for that matter) excels at explaining the writing life and how poems are written, Heaney in The Government of the Tongue (and all his essay work) excels… better than any poet I know other than Brodsky… at telling us how a poem works and which poems and poets do it best. Ultimately, you read Heaney’s essays because you want to know who and what you should be reading next.

According to my usual notes on the inside front cover, I first read The Government of the Tongue in the spring of 1989. That spring I was still a year away from turning 30 and a just a summer away from getting married. In those days, I lived in the Midway area of St. Paul and worked as an editor in downtown Minneapolis. I would have been reading The Government of the Tongue then on the 16A bus that follows the long course of University Ave. from downtown St. Paul to downtown Minneapolis. I would have been reading it on sleepy mornings on my way to work and hot afternoons on my way back. I would have been reading it on long weekends with Sue and quiet Sunday afternoons. Heaney and his ideas about poetry and poets would have bookended my days and my weeks.

Opening now the volume, I look at lines I highlighted and notes I made all those years ago about poets like Mandelstam, Lowell, Kavanaugh, Plath, Yeats, Auden, and Brodsky. I realize reading the lines and notes how much Heaney has influenced me: the poets I have read, the poems I most admire, my way of looking at how poems work… or should work.

“We might say that Kavanaugh is pervious to this world’s spirit more than it is pervious to his spirit.” (cf. essay “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanaugh”)

“He assumes that art is a power and to be visited by it is to be endangered, but also he knows that works of art endanger nobody else, that they are benign.” (cf. essay “The Murmur of Malvern”)

“…annihilation is certain and therefore all human endeavour is futile – annihillation is certain and therefore all human endeavour is victorious.” (cf. essay “The Fully Exposed Poem”)

“Richard Ellmann’s statement of the Yeatsian case finally applicable…’If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer, and this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do conciously, and all men do in their degree.’” (cf. the title essay “The Government of the Tongue”)

“Here is the great paradox of poetry and the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless…. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited.” (cf. the title essay “The Government of the Tongue”)

“A new rhythm, after all, is a new life given to the world, a resuscitation not just of the ear but of the springs of being… Auden’s lines… are wakenings to a new reality, lyric equivalents of the fault he intuited in the life of his times.” (cf. essay “Sounding Auden”)

“[Lowell’s] mentors were… New Critics driven by a passion to pluck out the last secret of any poem by unearthing, if necessary, its seventh ambiguity.” (cf. essay “Lowell’s Command”)

“I do not suggest that the self is not the proper arena of poetry. But I believe that the greatest work occurs when a certain self-forgetfulness is attained, or a least a fullness of self-possession denied Sylvia Plath.” (cf. essay “The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath”)

Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue contains the usual variety of occasional essays, book introductions, and book reviews you would expect a famous poet to write. Most of the book, however, consists of essay adaptations from a series of lectures Heaney originally gave to university students and faculty. Heaney’s prose fits that venue quite well. His is not the lyrical prose of Hall. Not the kind of prose you would immediately associate with the writer of Field Work and Station Island. It is the careful and considered work of one who has seriously studied poetry and poets… of one who truly knows and understands poetry from the inside out.

Heaney has a remarkable ear and a remarkable intellect. Because of that, The Government of the Tongue is a remarkable book.

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This is the first book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.”

The best way to learn about poetry is to read poetry… and to read poets talking about it. With that in mind, over the next few weeks, MontanaWriter will be highlighting a number of books that feature poets talking about poetry, beginning with Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982-88 by Donald Hall.

The greatest challenge in reviewing a collection of essays written for different occasions, audiences, and publications is trying to say a few things in general about a number of potentially mutually exclusive particulars. Do you highlight each individual essay? Do you group them thematically and talk about them that way? Or do you go a different route altogether? Regular readers of MontanaWriter will no doubt be less than surprised to find that I am choosing the last option.

I first read, Poetry and Ambition (according to my note on the inside front cover) in the summer of 1996. In the summer of 1996, I was an at-home dad with a one and a three-year-old. During the days I would have been doing the parenting thing and during naps editing and writing bible studies and training materials. In the evenings then I had a part-time telemarketing job I went to a few nights of the week.

I would have been reading these essays then… during breaks at work, and in my  cubicle waiting for calls to come in. Donald Hall was helping me to keep my sanity. Poetry has always been that for me.

Picking the volume off the shelf, I look now at lines I underlined and highlighted 15 years ago:

“I see no reason to spend you life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.” (cf. the title essay, “Poetry and Ambition”)

“…you have to realize, the countryside is full of people who who do what they want to do. The suburbs are full of people doing what they hate to do, because they need to in order to maintain their debts.” (cf. part of Hall’s response to question in “An Interview with Donald Hamilton”)

“No excellent poem is immediately receivable, even in silent reading.” (cf. essay “Public Performance/Private Art”)

“Sometimes when people praise the sound of verse, they are dismissed as anti-intellectual.” (cf. essay “Naming the Skin.”)

“The writer of genius is the writer who fails most at what he or she tries hardest to accomplish.” (cf. essay “Theory X Theory”)

“…what a wonderful autobiography [Phillip] Larkin could write, about a life in which nothing has happened: always the most interesting biography.” (cf. essay “Deprivation’s Laureate”)

“‘Poetry is the supreme result of the entire language,’ says Joseph Brodsky. Poetry is what language is for, what language exists to move toward.” (cf. essay “The way to Say Pleasure”)

There are 19 essays in Poetry and Ambition.  Read together they flush out Hall’s substantial understanding of the creative process, poetry and poetic language, the role of poetry in society, and the contributions of individual poets. Included are essays on William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Philip Larkin and on modern Irish poetry. The excellent title essay is inspiring. The essay “Public Performance/Private Art” is a wonderful treatise on the business-end of writing and performing poetry.

My favorite essay, though, is the one entitled “About ‘Names of Horses.’” In it he provides background to his poem called “Names of Horses.” But more than that, he provides background into the creative process and an entre into reading and appreciating one particular poem. A poem that is now one of my favorite Hall poem’s.

I could easily add many dozen more lines to those I highlighted above… or a dozen notes I made in margins and in the back of the book on blank pages. Hall is that good a writer and this is that good a book.

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