–Chard deNiord
POETRY
I was thinking about a hero I once had, a poet who had lived a turbulent life, who I knew when he first arrived in this country, who was a teacher of mine, later a friend. He was a man of great courage. He was ten years my senior and he died long before his time.
He is often in my thoughts, but this time there was a special twist. I was doing the numbers, as I can’t help doing sometimes, and realized, though not for the first time, that I am almost twenty years older than he had been when he died. It boggles the mind. I am dumbstruck before the simple fact.
For my position as the student, one much younger, had me locking him in as the elder, the wise one—an inviolable seniority. I can’t square that original formation with what I’m reckoning now. From where I sit now, he was so much younger—all these years I’ve gone on living—but there’s no undoing of the original perception. Dead at 56, he remains my mentor even in absentia.
So many things come up. A certain sense of privilege—at having known him, but also the dubious entitlement of having outlived him by so many years. Of course, that holds true not just with one’s admired teacher, but so many who have passed on, people who entered the life and held some sway. People one liked and now lament, and people one disliked. Either way, the survival is the inescapable point, the philosophical bone one gets to gnaw on, but never to the point of gratification. First thought: what was it all for, then, all that expense of energy? Second thought: and one day someone will apply that frame to me, my life. None of this is new. I picture those old paintings, like St. Jerome in his Study, and the countless others. Yorick, the japery there in the cemetery.
~
I am a reader of, but no expert in, the works of Robert Lowell, but it’s not really the poetry that I have on my mind. Rather, it’s the question of literary influence, how it works through our culture, rising and falling, maybe rising again. I pick Lowell as my exemplar because, time and circumstance being what they are, I’ve been around long enough to trace the trajectory of the arc.
I moved to Boston in 1978, a year after the poet died, but, figuratively speaking, the body was still warm. One of the first events I attended was a memorial reading given by his old friend Elizabeth Bishop in Harvard’s Emerson Hall. Bishop had major stature then, but nothing yet like Lowell’s. I was too new to know the faces, but I’m sure that Lowell’s people were there in force. I’m guessing: Frank Bidart, Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky…
The poet was gone, but the influence and the aura persisted. His seminars at Boston University, attended by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and George Starbuck were legend. Frank Bidart had been his friend and editorial consultant. So many poets kept the man’s currency alive, secured his place as one of the masters.
Then came the laureates—Derek Walcott who was teaching at Boston University; Seamus Heaney who had a post at Harvard; and Joseph Brodsky out at Mt. Holyoke College. The three were friends, and they were all devoted to Lowell. They tended the flame, and they brought the influence to their students.
Lowell seemed safely canonized. But gradually things changed—poetic styles, cultural attitudes. The laureates all died, and successor generations had a lesser investment. I was there for the ebbing of the tide. Lowell was seen as patrician, patriarchal. Elizabeth Bishop was a worthy replacement. There was no great wave of revisionist criticism, just—more deadly—a collective shift of attention.
How do these things work? I have no great confidence that Lowell will have a major revival. Much would have to change. For me, he remains. I turn to him in my privacy—he feels very alive. Just recently I quoted him to a friend. I was in a mood. They were lines from “Waking Early Sunday Morning: No weekends for the gods now. Wars/ flicker, earth licks its open sores,/ fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance/ assassinations, no advance./ Only man thinning out his kind/sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind/ swipe of the pruner and his knife/ busy about the tree of life.
We should not set the man aside just yet.
~
Possibly not the, but certainly one of the most beautiful words in our language, the way it starts with its bright first syllable, and then declines, much as the sun is doing at that time of day. Evening.
I think of poet Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come,” which makes visual that same slow decline:
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
The poem concludes on a consoling note:
Let evening come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
The word is dense with association for me, taking me back to my years of growing up in Michigan back in the 1950s.
On summer nights, those hours of fading light were so much about sounds, near and far. There was always the lawnmower yards away, waxing and waning as the man (it was always a man) went up and back on his patch of lawn. And then, often as not, our neighbor Billy Wilbur, two houses down, would be out with his model airplanes, guiding them through elaborate loops. The orchestra of crickets, of course. Oddly, thinking back, I don’t remember TV noise, maybe just the simmer of a Tigers’ night game from the radio in our neighbor’s, garage, where he could be found sitting surrounded by his war trophies, the helmets and spent grenades and bayonets, his souvenirs from his time in the war.
~
This evening I went to a reading in Amherst by a poet I know. Talking between poems, he mused on the vital distinction between poems that are costly, worked for, and the ones that come as gifts. Every writer appreciates the distinction. I do. With regard to my meditations, this occasion was brought to me on a platter.
B is a poet I’ve known for fifty-seven years—a genuine span. He and I were schoolmates back in Michigan. I was two years older, but very much aware of him. He had a young clamorous presence. A few friends and I had started a literary magazine, Tracks and B would come to our ‘office’ in the tower room to hang around. He gave us his poems to consider.
The poems were good—ironic and subtly worked—far better than most of the submissions we were considering. We put out two issues and B was included in both. Just a few years later he was winning prizes and getting rave endorsements from well-known poets. He wrote and published across all genres—the man introducing him reported that he had published eighteen books.
B and I crossed paths later. We taught writing at the same college for several years. We would meet sometimes to catch up on old school gossip.
The bookstore audience was small but distinguished—ours is a literary community. I sat up close, and though I didn’t usually do the math when we met, I couldn’t help it now.
Usually casual, B was wearing a jacket and tie. His hair now silver, clubman’s stomach half-hidden behind a colorful wide tie—I found myself shuttling back and forth in time as he read. The ardent schoolboy, the man in front of me.
This trafficking in time feels profound. It is, if only for the resonance it brings into my life. I’m not just remembering the young B as I listen. I’m holding the long time between as if between pincers. Time passing is somehow made tangible. I watch my old colleague in his formal guise, but what I see, almost more clearly, is the lanky kid standing outside the tower door, asking to come up.
~
I like Baudelaire’s poem “The Albatross,” which gives the image of the great sea birds captured by sailors and mocked for the drooping wings they drag behind. One sailor sticks a pipe in its beak. Baudelaire likens this put up0n creature to the Poet, who, by analogy, “frequents the tempest,” flies so proudly, but becomes, when exiled on earth, “the butt of hoots and jeers.”
The image of the grounded bird creates a comic but also pathetic characterization. Pathetic, that is, insofar as we focus on the bird on the ship as opposed to the bird riding the winds up high. We are shown magnificence brought low, but with just enough trace remaining to suggest some larger redemption.
I have known so many poets, including, by good luck, several great ones, but none escape Baudelaire’s assessment (which is, of course, for him a self-assessment as well). M0ving about down below, in our shared ordinary world, they bumble along with the rest of us, squinting over restaurant tabs, falling for the praise of sycophants, losing their car keys, hoping that their status as poets will grant them some special dispensation.
They drink, divorce, feud—they are just plain fallible.
But when it happens, when they strike true, when their words fit together, even just for a charmed line or two, the reader is for the duration in touch with another order of things. It’s hard to describe that state, for me anyway, without falling back on the old Latin phrase sub specie aeternitatis. Most simply, it’s the abrupt re-contextualizing of things in the present by invoking the God’s eye perspective: under the aspect of eternity…
As Wittgenstein wrote: “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis…The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.” The paradox is that the outside view can generate a beauty that we register in our innermost core.
~
The memory comes for some unknown reason. It’s 1968 and I’m a junior at Cranbrook, the boys’ school. The first inklings of change are in the air. We’re all letting our hair grow, waiting for something. One day at assembly we’re told that Donald Hall, a well-known poet, will be reading the next day in one of the dorm lounges. I know the room–dark wood paneling, brass lamps, fireplace…
I’m excited. The idea of the ‘writer’ is big for me—I’ve taken up my mother’s romantic regard for these brooding yet dashing figures—but I’ve never met a ‘real’ one before.
Hall is down from Ann Arbor where he teaches literature and serves as ‘poet in residence.’ The reading is not mandatory, but we pack the lounge. A fire has been lit. The poet is ushered into the room by one of the English professors, who then steps up to introduce him. He looks every inch the part. He’s wearing a slightly rumpled tweed jacket, holding a few books and loose papers; his expression is at once benign and meditative. Clearly he is in touch with things still beyond our ken.
He comes up to the podium and we are not disappointed. Hall has a sonorous, manly voice, sounds a bit like Richard Burton, though he is in fact a New England boy. I’m rapt, transported. Here is a real poet reading his poems. I know that this is something important, more important than other things. The voice, the lines, the lingering pauses—everything seems touched with a special wisdom.
The poem I remember—to this day—was “My Son, My Executioner.”
Did it not capture everything about life in twelve short lines? My son, my executioner/ I take you in my arms. Such tenderness and care…Hall calls the boy our instrument of immortality, only to then announce your cries and hunger document/ our bodily decay. I’m thrilled by the paradox, and then by authority of the last quatrain: We twenty two and twenty five/who seemed to live forever/ observe enduring life in you/and start to die together.
Right place, right time, and the readiness that is the all. In that hot and crowded room, I feel the lift, the liberation—what’s been hinted at once or twice before, but now confirmed: that there is another way of seeing things. It’s available, but also mostly just out of reach. I’ve found that to be true.
~
This morning—Sunday—I heard in my ear a scrap of Wallace Stevens from the opening of his “Sunday Morning.” It was just a phrase, but it was one that registered:
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe
The poem intends a biblical reach, but for me this bit stood on its own. The word ‘encroachment’ applied to ‘catastrophe,’ caught something I’ve been contending with. I do write to ponder inward things; but, I admit, also to fend against what feels like the madness of the world. Encroachment was the word that stuck.
Policies and their consequences are one thing, calamities another. I can with effort push them aside for a time, though I feel them there, pending. It’s the other stuff that finds its way in—the amorality, the cravenness, the willful deceit, the glee in cruelty, the mendacity. Here is the human material exposed in full. It calls for a Dante—a writer who was able to nourish his rage, give it living form in his terza rima lines. Who is going to manage that?
Deep frustration. The catastrophe seeps in through every fissure and I don’t know what to do with it. It doesn’t yet gather to a useful rage—it depletes. I try to write about some memory or moment of recognition, but I can’t ignore the darkness in the wings. There’s a new context, one in which everything I aspire to is seen as irrelevant and, worse, is under threat.
Everything is on the table. As the fitness of my values is tested, I work to scramble a defense. Stevens sends me to Brecht, who writes, I would also like to be wise./ The old books tell us what’s wise:/To keep our distance from worldly disputes—before adding: But I can’t do any of that:/ Really, I live in dark times.
The only response I see is to double-down inwardly, rally the self on behalf of all it has gathered, hold to the faith that there is in all of us a resistant humanity.
~
I woke up today wanting to write something about Adam Zagajewski, the feeling of his poems. Arbitrarily, I chose his book Unseen Hand, thumbed it open and almost right away found the thing I wanted:
I look at a photograph of the city where I was born,
at its lush gardens and winding streets, at the hills,
the Catholic roofs, the domes of the Orthodox churches,
where on Sunday the basses sing so mightily
that neighboring trees sway as in a hurricane;
I gaze at the photograph, I can’t tear my eyes away,
and I suddenly imagine that they’re all still alive
as if nothing had happened-upon (tr. Clare Cavanagh)
“I Look at a Photograph,” goes on for thirty more lines, and I wish I had room for the rest here.
Right now, in my chair, kitchen light on in the distance, it’s the most interesting question I can ask: why do some poems feel like part of the fabric of our lives, while others, even supposed masterpieces, elude us?
What registers is different for everyone. At its ultimate point of contact, a poem is a personal communique that is about far more than the words on the page. Full experience requires a deep pre-disposition on the part of the reader, as well as a receptivity to certain images, sounds, and rhythms—one’s unique personal scansion.
Zagajewski, translated, reaches me with no sense of barrier. How is that?
I am not Catholic, nor was Latvia, the family’s home country, but the aerial vantage he takes on his town coincides closely with the way my parents talked about Riga and how I pictured it. Zagajewski is a nostalgist, as am I. I’m nostalgic for a time and place I knew only from stories. He broods on loss (as do all poets) but with a deceptively light touch (trees sway to the power of the basses as if in a hurricane), somehow leading up to the plainspoken but utterly piercing way he writes and suddenly I imagine that they’re all still alive…
The poet is able to move his poems into an indeterminate chronology. They mourn loss even as they suggest that nothing is really lost. This hits me hard. When I woke up thinking of Zagajewski this was the feeling I was longing for.
~
We went to visit our son Liam in Northampton yesterday. He took us out back to show what he and Katherine had planted. They have an old shed out at the far back of the lot and I saw that he had used a mower to clear a straight path to the door. The rest of the yard was knee-high field grasses. I asked him why he hadn’t mowed. “The fireflies,” he said. “They’re everywhere at night.”
It was the field grass, obviously. I haven’t seen a single firefly in the four years we’ve lived in Amherst.
Some connections flash right away, others are on a slow fuse, arriving only when the time is right. It came to me later.
I spent years teaching in the Bennington Writing Seminars, ten days in the winter residency and ten in the summer. All that time! Faculty were housed off campus in guest houses surrounded by orchards and fields. At night, from a back step or a porch, those flickering signals as far as the eye could see. So easy to fall into a watching trance—there was a code, but what was it saying?
Those lights and the background pulse of crickets—a season distilled. For twenty summers I had those nights, so sweet in recollection. But there was something else. The teaching, yes, the people, but over and above, what I knew in my bones—that these were the good years. I had no idea what might come next, but I knew even then that this was the time. This was what in baseball movies they call “the show.”
My life brings instances of this, the knowing that somehow lies beneath, the faraway stare that has its own point of focus. I found these words by poet Marie Howe just today:
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies…very much like that moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin…
~
You can only have your eyes opened so many times, and it’s never sure what will do the job. Where poetry is concerned, for me, it was not “Ozymandias” or “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” but an out-of-class encounter that broke me through the wall of mere admiration.
The poem was “The Thought Fox” by Ted Hughes. I don’t remember where I found it, but I still feel how the first lines caught me up:
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: Something else is alive/
Besides the clock’s loneliness /And this blank page where my fingers move.
The poet is in the act of writing, trying to bring a moment, an atmosphere, into language. He suggests the creature with the most careful sensory touch, and as he does we feel it start to come alive:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now/ And again now, and now, and now/
Sets new prints into the snow
The enactment is so right, the repetition ofnow placing the four prints in sequence. I feel the lightness of the movement. I’ve forgotten that a man is sitting in front of a page, composing. I’m entirely attuned to the creature, who is
Brilliantly, concentratedly,/ coming about its own business
Until a shock of words abruptly turns me around. It is an act of imagination, initiated and brought home:
Till, with a sharp stink of fox /It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless; the clock ticks,/ The page is printed.
The final swerve makes the mind’s motions suddenly visceral. I remember the Helen Keller moment: letters traced on one palm, the wakening splash of cold water on the other. There are bigger, more important poems, but I was new to the art back then and that leap across the synapse will still not be denied.
Postscript: Some forty years later, Seamus Heanery introduced me to his great friend, Ted Hughes. It should have been a momentous moment, but for some reason it fell short. I remember a hulking presence in rough tweeds, a solid grip of the hand, but nothing so clear as the imagined animal in its forest.
~
Pleasures forgotten and then re-discovered…This is one of the purest, I think. We are up at a beautiful lake for a week, one, as I wrote before, that we have come to many times over the years. But there has been a lapse, enough of a lapse that when I first walked down the steep stone pathway to the shore and saw the three kayaks on their rack, I didn’t immediately feel like going out. It was hot and my knee was hurting, and the boats themselves looked scratched and neglected.
The night was full of loons, and the next morning, stepping to the window, I saw that the lake was completely calm, holding that soft pewter glow. The muscle memory took hold.
I’ve never been limber, even when I should have been, and I’m less limber now. So while wincing over the rough rocks around the deck and dragging a kayak off the rack was manageable, actually getting into the thing was a challenge.
Tilting the kayak toward me, I hoisted my right leg in. Then, penitent and prayerful, I held tight and tried to get my left—my obstacle leg— in. It worked. With a shock, all those long-ago mornings merged with the rush of the first momentum, the slide. So much fuss getting in, but now the smooth propulsion, the surge coming with every pull of the oar.
I made my way toward a small white boathouse on the far shore. In the middle of such an expanse, I felt I could let everything go. And then the grand white clouds came into view. There in the distance above the trees, but their massy white shapes printed on the water right in front of me. I thought of Holderlin’s‘Half of Life’: The land with yellow pears/And full of wild roses/Hangs into the lake.
His is an autumn poem. For me, it was the second day of summer. Leaning back in my seat, cutting into the glassy illusion with every stroke, this was as close as I was ever going to get. The solstice was just the other day. My fellow Latvians had just been celebrating the night by jumping over bonfires. This trance-like movement into the clouds was my connection.
~
Every now and then bits from my reading arrive unannounced, as if to say ‘this is what you are really thinking about.’ I trust these little visitations. Most recently, it was a half-remembered passage from the poet Montale, from his reminiscence of his visit with the celebrated French writer, Andre Malraux. I went to find the piece.
Montale has gone to do an interview with Malraux. “He has spoken for an hour and a half,” he writes, “giving the illusion of talking to a friend and having opened himself up for the first time.” Back on the street he reflects: “I don’t know whether to envy the regal destiny…of Andre Malraux, but this evening I’m less unhappy with my own.” The tactful shiv.
What put this in mind? I’d like to think it was something more than the Venetian wedding of recent memory, but a more serious reflective inquiry. It’s a subject I do think about. Why is it that I don’t want to be anybody else, exchange all the terms of my life for another’s? To be younger, richer or more athletic—what a wonderful thing!— but if I were, I wouldn’t be me. It’s that simple. No way to be those things and be whoever I am now.
My most cherished possession is, without question, my subjective sense of myself, my ‘I.’ But then, I have a sane and mostly pleasant life. What if I were indigent, or terminally ill? Would I give that self up? I am always making comparisons. Aren’t we all? But nothing I see beckons, no other person’s life. There’s just one thing—my envy of another’s artistic talent, the transcendence I imagine it allows. But is it enough to sacrifice my precious ‘I’ for? No. How do others feel?
I remember an occasion some years ago. I had given a talk and it had gone well. A young man came up to me after. He said, in congratulatory hyperbole, “I enjoyed that.” A pause, then with a light sardonic tinge, he added: “I want to be just like you!” Tinge or no, my reflex was immediate: “I can assure you—you do not!” And I meant it.
~
The trouble with writing about outrage, is that it lacks nuance. Venting, we draw on a small range of possible expressions. We sputter—what else can we do?—and trust that others will take the point. Descend into nuance and the outrage vanishes.
What kinds of nuance are even possible with Gaza, Israel, Congress, Ukraine…The fine points can be found in political analyses. But fine points are not what I carry around. I carry a toxic bundle hedged around with cautions. Beware. If you take this on it will silence you.
Something is serendipitous only if you see the connections. Unable to write about outrage, I was receptive enough when I later found a poem by Jack Gilbert—a poem I didn’t know. It’s from his book Refusing Heaven, and there were lines that glowed:
There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,/and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay./If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,/we lessen the importance of their deprivation./we must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,/ but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have/the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless/ furnace of this world.
Reading, I thought ‘this is the nuance.’ We are not to turn on our delight even in the face of the most terrible things. Gilbert re-contextualizes, creating a psychological balance. Suffering is seen for what it is, but the opposite is given its place. As it is in Adam Zagajewski’s ‘Praise the Mutilated World’:
Praise the mutilated world/and the gray feather a thrush lost,/and the gentle light that strays and vanishes/ and returns.
Beautiful, but it’s also hard to hold to this against the tidings that come daily—it feels like a partial recompense at best.
