William Logan http://poetryfoundation.org/dispatches/journals/ GAINESVILLE, FLMy little brother once said, “Spinach is my enemy.” He also said, “I don’t like to nap—I like to sleep in a regular life situation.” en Copyright 2007 Fri, 03 Nov 2006 11:35:56 -0600 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss "Friday" &> Randall Jarrell wrote that “Poets are in the beginning hypotheses, in the middle facts, and in the end values,” which may be another way of saying that poets begin as questions marks, become exclamation points, and end as ellipses. Great Caesar’s ghost! Last summer, in a moment of weakness, I promised the Poetry Foundation folks (PoFofos, for short) a blog, having only the faintest idea what a blog was. I threw out a date that seemed sufficiently far away, an ice age or two. Now—as in a bad movie—the PoFo has come knocking on the door with a priest, a couple of guards, and an apology from the warden. I’ve read some of the previous journals and if they were any duller you could print them on cereal boxes and put half the nation back to sleep every morning. Especially the ones by those jokers on the bus tour, reliving their Ken Kesey fantasy and making the mistake of telling everybody about it, at length. I tried to read their collaborative poem on Santa Cruz, but the fair city of Santa Cruz should put out warrants for their arrest. A few of my former students write blogs—so, all right, I’m not piss-ignorant on the subject. I’ve read blogs by other poets. Most of the entries are humdrum stuff, this sort of thing: 1) I had bacon and frog’s legs and those miniature Tibetan pears for breakfast; 2) Goodness, I just wrote a poem about the sinking of the Titanic!; 3) I’m preparing my new manuscript, titled The Second Time Around Was Too Much for Me, or maybe just Revolution—what do you think, dear readers?; 4) I was blown away by that poem by Strand in Mother Jones, or was it the poem by Rodney Jones in the Strand?; 5) My lovely, lovely child, who has the most lovely, lovely name (Mica, which is, you know, very unique), just took a lovely, lovely shit in our lovely, lovely toilet, and his stools are the same exact shape as those teensy, tiny pears from Tibet; 6) Have you heard the latest gossip about Jorie Graham? I mean, whatever. Old news: these lines from Edwin Arlington Robinson—
         She may have reasoned in the dark That one way of the few there were          Would hide her and would leave no mark: Black water, smooth above the weir          Like starry velvet in the night, Though ruffled once, would soon appear          The same as ever to the sight.
I don’t much like Robinson—the ways in which he tried too hard don’t seem worth the trying, and he’s at any moment susceptible to the sort of Romantic nonsense that gives similes a bad name: “Like starry velvet in the night” might as well be a portrait of Elvis, on velvet. And yet! These seven lines show the most tender discretion. They don’t say the woman’s a suicide, partly so as not to have to say it (her husband—the poem is “The Mill”—has just hung himself; but all the poet writes is “But what was hanging from a beam / Would not have heeded where she went”). The woman isn’t just hiding from her life; she’s hiding from her dead husband. The water will be ruffled only once, so she plans to drop straight down (perhaps she will weight her pockets with rocks, like Virginia Woolf). The black water will resume its blank reflection of the black sky—but underneath the water, there is a weir. The water must therefore be tidal. The weir will become visible at low tide, in a dozen hours; then her body will be discovered. (Weirs must have been a point of interest for Robinson, because they come into “Eros Turannos” as well—as metaphor.) What haunts me about this portrait is the way the woman doesn’t want to make any fuss (and she’s not making a statement about failure, as her husband did, by dying in his failed mill). The poem is troubling the way the best of Hardy is troubling. Tonight I saw the glow of sunset beyond the shopping center, the sky a steady black declining to the dusty orange that radiated behind the shaggy black outlines of palm trees. That’s northern Florida a month after the equinox, the nights cooling, ladybugs nesting in the window frame, geckos still taking a meal of moths attracted to the lit windows—and the skies so lurid they look painted by color-blind hacks. I’d like to say I was at the shopping center watching the birds, because the retention ponds there attract egrets, ibises, and wood storks. In fact, I was there to see Infamous, a movie so intent on making its points six or seven times, and then making them again (Art is Hard; Art is Very, Very, Hard; You Write a Good Book and Then, and Then You Die!), that I would have paid twice as much if they’d hung Truman Capote along with the two killers. I don’t see that poetry blogs do any active harm, or that they do much active good. If I want to read about someone’s life, I read Coleridge’s letters or Byron’s journals or Herzen’s memoirs. If the ephemera and disjecta membra of your own life bore you to tears, well, mine bore me, too. You’d be doing me a favor by complaining to the Poetry Foundation and getting them to yank me before the week is out. You’re welcome to comment on this blog or ask questions, and if I don’t answer it’s because the questions are too difficult. <& /poetrycomp/journal-tuesday.comp, day=>"Friday" &> Frank O’Hara would have loved writing a blog, but it would have stopped him from writing poems—everything that went into his poems, all that helter-skelter of New York life, would have drained into the blog and stayed there, like sewage. The best poetry blog, avant la lettre, was the Dove-Viebahn Christmas newsletter (actually it was more of a tabloid, and could have had paid advertising), which Mr. Rita Dove used to issue sometime between December and July. I believe it may now be defunct; but it ran six pages, with photographs, and was divided into what can only be called news articles about plays produced, awards received, honors collected, famous people met and charmed. If you weren’t on the Dove-Viebahn Christmas list, no matter—it was widely redistributed by samizdat. (I know of at least two literary magazines that kept file copies.) I used to get copies from people who got copies from people, and I passed it on myself. It’s hard to capture the flavor, the particular awe, with which Mr. Rita Dove treated Mrs. Rita Dove (there was something tender and sweet about it, too—but the letter made it seem that she had married her own publicity agent). I recall the caption to one photo, “Rita with Mrs. Colin Powell (Colin in background).” I’ve just finished the fall poetry chronicle for the New Criterion. I like writing criticism for about twelve days a year, but unfortunately it takes longer than that to finish a chronicle. At the end, I’m left with three feet of current poetry books, which I usually throw at a passing librarian. There are two kinds of librarians, those who love lending books so much they don’t care if anyone ever returns them, and those who hate readers so much they glue the books to the shelves. I like the librarians who hate readers—they appeal to my sense of the perverse. The cook’s speech to the sharks in chapter 64 of Moby-Dick is as hilarious as anything in Dickens. Stubb, one of the mates, has complained to the black cook (called “old Fleece,” among other things) that the whale steak is overdone. He tells the cook to go preach to the sharks eating the dead whale drawn up to the Pequod, and the cook obliges.
“Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise dare. You hear? Stop dat damn smackin’ ob de lip! Massa Stubb say that you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop dat dam racket.”
Stubb and the cook have a series of exchanges, and then the cook returns to preaching.
“Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now, look here, bred’ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your neighbour’s mout, I say.
It’s a humor that has never gone well in poetry. (It is, I would argue, a racial humor rather than a racist humor; but the issue is a swamp for good intentions.) Melville’s poetry contains almost nothing of this aspect of his genius; when you read his poetry, you think that he was a Ferrari trying to be a Volkswagen (or, to cut the metaphors from the cloth of his century, an Arabian thoroughbred trying to be a draft horse). Poetry now could use such complex ironies, rather than the goofball poetics and dumb-and-dumber jokes and precious surrealism (like Fabergé eggs made of bubblegum) that often hold sway. A reader dropped off a question, but because he didn’t leave name or e-mail the editors didn’t post it. I’ll include it here.
Mr. Logan, Since you asked, I’ve got a question: Do you think your somewhat notorious poetry hatchet has ever, after slicing clean through whatever subject stands before you, come back around to lop off one of your own legs? I mean, you DO seem to have some trouble walking around poetry land. I just wonder if you feel you may have caused this yourself.
Everyone knows that reviewing poetry is a dangerous business. The life expectancy of a poetry critic is slightly lower than for a ball-turret gunner flying B-24s over Berlin or a private walking point in the Mekong. I myself haven’t been stabbed or shot more than half a dozen times, and the car bombs were both defused. The Ninja assault was mere rumor. It’s true that I can’t travel in four Eastern states (all small and inconsequential) and seven west of the Mississippi. If the gentle reader is asking whether this is my own fault, well, of course it is. No one was ever forced to become a poetry critic (except in certain obscure provinces formerly under the rule of Queen Victoria), and I doubt any sane soul ever wanted to be one. I started in a much more gentlemanly profession, that of rock critic, and when thrown out found myself reduced to reviewing poetry. The reader’s surmise is correct—like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I am frequently reduced, my limbs having been lopped off, to biting. <& /poetrycomp/journal-wednesday.comp, day=>"Friday" &> A man who is tired of poetry is tired of life, so they say; but when I’m tired of poetry I take down Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poems and am often restored. Everyone knows “Jabberwocky,” and many know “The White Knight’s Ballad,” which may be the most hilarious poem in English. But how many know “Hiawatha’s Photographing,” which as far as I’m concerned constitutes the chief reason to be grateful that Longfellow ever existed?
From his shoulder Hiawatha Took the camera of rosewood, Made of sliding, folding rosewood; Neatly put it all together, In its case it lay compactly, Folded into nearly nothing; But he opened out the hinges, Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges, Till it looked all squares and oblongs, Like a complicated figure In the Second Book of Euclid.
And so on for another hundred lines. Pretty soon Carroll is sending up Ruskin. Among those with a taste for nonsense, there is the Camp of Carroll and the Camp of Lear. I’m an Edward Lear fan, I admit it, but not of the verse. He was a clumsy poet, and I hope I’m not the only reader who finds the nonsense verse mostly oafish and the limericks mostly dreadful—in the very form he popularized he showed only a mild (if deranged) talent. His insistence on repeating the first end-word as the last, as he mostly did, made too many limericks seem anticlimactic. When I think of Lear’s limericks, I think of the sultan who offered a prize to the best poet in his land. Two poets came forward. The sultan heard the first poem and immediately awarded the prize to the other poet. In any contest with Lear, the other limerick writer would win. (I’m grateful for the non-limericks only because Eliot was provoked by one to that stylish piece of self-criticism beginning “How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!”) As an oil painter, Lear was so stilted, his paintings still turn people to stone. Why am I a Lear fan, then? He was a genius at water colors and drawings, and once you’ve seen his hand you can’t mistake it for anyone else’s. His landscapes are extraordinary and fresh, and he traveled much of his adult life to make them—to Venice, to India, to Greece, to Albania, getting up early in the morning and sketching ruins and rocks. He hoped to turn a lot of these sketches into oils, and sometimes time (mostly they were unsalable). He’s remembered for the drawings themselves, of which there were some ten thousand at his death. They have a vividness and an immediacy the oil paintings entirely lack. Lear was also, at a precocious age, an avian artist possibly more brilliant than Audubon. Lear’s letters, too, are hilarious—if there’s affectation in Lear, it’s affectation of the most humane sort. While staying in Venice, he reads in the Times that a friend in England has obtained a high government position:
I threw the paper up into the air and jumped aloft myself—ending by taking a small fried whiting out of the plate before me and waving it round my foolish head triumphantly till the tail came off and the body and head flew bounce over to the other side of the table d’hôte room. Then only did I perceive that I was not alone, but that a party was at breakfast in a recess. Happily for me they were not English, and when I made an apology saying I had suddenly seen some good news of a friend of mine, these amiable Italians said—“Bravissimo, signore! We rejoice with you! And if only we had some little fish we would throw them about the room too, in sympathy with you!”
*** I hate hate speech, I hate hate speech so much I hate myself for hating it. I hate the haters of hate speech just as I hate the haters of haters of hate speech. I hate hate speech so much I even hate the words “hate speech,” and if I hate hate hate hate speech long enough, hate it with the hatingest kind of hatred, probably hate speech will go away. I’m sure of it. I’m a believer in the Church of Lenny Bruce, which holds that the only way to defuse such language is to repeat it, not to give it power by making it taboo. If the word “hate” above didn’t become nonsense by the end of the paragraph, I wasn’t trying hard enough. Bruce had to use the words in order to offend, and it wouldn’t have been the same had he said, “If President Kennedy got on television and said, ‘I’m considering appointing two or three of the top n— words in the country to my cabinet’—if it was nothing but n— word, n— word, n— word—in six months n— word wouldn’t mean any more than good night, god bless you . . .—when that beautiful day comes, you’ll never see another n— word kid come home from school crying because some motherfucker called him a n— word.” I have a colleague who lives to be offended. He told me that a Southern fiction writer who read at Florida some years ago (I happened to be out of town), prefaced a story by saying, “Well, this story was written a long time back, and we used to talk this way.” My colleague said, “That was an aggressive act.” I didn’t understand what he meant, and finally he said, “It was n— this and n— that, page after page.” (This is the way my colleague said it, “n— this and n— that,” and he lowered his voice, even though we were talking by telephone.) I still didn’t understand, and then I did (I thought he was saying, “It was en this and en that,” and I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.) “It was a very aggressive act,” my colleague whispered. I understood then, not why we hadn’t hired the writer (that was the result of those politics that make university life so sweet), but why there was general rejoicing when we didn’t. I’d have said the writer was trying not to whitewash the old days—until the mid-sixties, you heard the word “nigger” so often, even in the north, you hardly gave it a thought, just as you heard “mick,” “wop,” “guinea,” “kike,” “faggot,” and all the nastier denizens of American slang. For years, I thought I’d heard what my colleague calls the “n— word” for the last time in casual speech. Then, just a few years back, I was asking a cousin about our great-grandfathers, who were brothers growing up in Pittsburgh; and he said, “Oh, Saturday nights your great-grandfather would say to mine, ‘Let’s go up to the Hill and beat up some niggers.’” The use was, you’ll note, historical; but I was shocked to hear it coming from a retired dentist’s mouth. Note, I’m not advocating hauling the word back into use, because if you use it around me I will beat your fucking brains out, you little cocksucker motherfucker. I’m suggesting that we have become so dainty and cautious about such words, we’ve invested them with more power than they deserve. That word, that terrible word, should be treated as a word than once had power and is now interesting only as a dead bug in the etymology tray of language. I saw a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s stories, published in Britain, with the following entry in the table of contents: “The Artificial Nigger [sic].” I’m not sure who would feel better after seeing that “[sic],” but I know I felt worse. The only way to give power to the past is to lie about it. You want to talk about Pound’s and Eliot’s anti-Semitism? Fine, but don’t make out that they were exceptions, the two bad-boy anti-Semites of American verse. If you want to talk about Pound and Eliot, I want to talk about Marianne Moore writing her brother that a “coon took me up in the elevator” and Sylvia Plath mentioning a girl’s “jewy” nose. *** Some readers have asked questions. Let me answer them here. Steve Fellner introduced himself with compliments, then got down to the rough stuff: Sometimes I get disappointed by the predictability of your responses . . . . Sometimes though I do feel that you fall into a default cynicism, and make your target too easy: Sharon Olds, etc. I wish that you’re [sic] reviews exhibited a more TORTURED AMBIVALENCE: those sort of reviews are always the more interesting to read: it’s fun to watch the critic battling with himself. Fair enough. I’d love to undergo more conversions, to find myself suddenly adoring Sharon Olds, say; and I agree that anyone who has smudged his hands at the coal face of criticism for more than three decades is likely to find certain of his tastes hard to dislodge, even with a pickaxe. I open a new book by most poets with a sense of hope; when I can’t muster at least that, I don’t review the poet any longer. There are poets whose work I find myself torturously ambivalent about, or ambivalently tortured by—Louise Glück, Paul Muldoon, John Ashbery, and Geoffrey Hill among them. Sometimes this torture comes in an odd way—the work as I remember it seems better than when I was reading it. Fellner remarks about my remarks about blogs, and I don’t disagree that there are better blogs than the ones I was making fun of—but most are far worse. I hope I wasn’t denying what blogs strive for, at best (selling an interest to Google, perhaps); but I confess that for me the ratio of rubies to dirt is too low. Half an hour spent with Byron’s journals or Lear’s letters is far more instructive—that doesn’t mean I think a steady diet of any one thing is healthy. I worry that most bloggers are so eager to identify the Next Hot Thing before them, they ignore all the riches behind them. Bryan Shoup asks: What’s the best poem you’ve read so far this year? What’s the best poem you’ve read this year from a new poet? The best poem I’ve read this year is Don Juan. Byron, most of whose work I have little feeling for, found there the right form for his flickering epic wit. It’s rare that a poet so young (he was just thirty when he began it) finds a form so suited to his talent and energy. Rather than choose one poem by a younger poet, I’ll say that I’ve liked some work by Morri Creech, whose second book, Field Knowledge, was just published by Waywiser. Other young poets I could mention had the misfortune of being my students, and I have a terrible rule that prevents me from reviewing them or giving them grants or awards. Or mentioning them when it might seem that mere fondness guided me. <& /poetrycomp/journal-thursday.comp, day=>"Friday" &> Logan the Blog Hostage, Day 4. The printing press gave any man who owned one the power of a scriptorium without the interruption of prayers. Better, he could print the Bible in the vernacular, which any man who could read (or be read to) could understand. (We owe much to an early translator like Tyndale, whose work underpinned the King James Bible.) The church was upset by this attack upon its monopoly—it didn’t matter to the priests if the Bible was in Latin and the flock spoke only German. Who cared what the sheep were speaking? The typewriter gave every man who owned one a cheap printing press. The Internet makes every man his own printer and distributor, at a cost only of his time. We live now in Babel and it’s cheap. *** Geoffrey Brock has convinced me that I’m wrong about the weir in Robinson’s “The Mill” (see the Monday entry). He pointed out something that had bothered me about the line “Black water, smooth above the weir.” In tidal waters, smooth water would be unusual, but it wouldn’t strange at all if this were a mill dam—a different kind of weir entirely. The woman, seeing her husband hanging from a mill rafter, goes outside and drowns herself in the calm waters above the mill weir; that is, in the pond above the spillway. I had taken “above” in the wrong sense. The reading must be revised in this way, too—her body won’t be discovered in a few hours. She’s trying to efface herself entirely, to vanish as if she had never lived. Decay being what it is, of course, in some days or weeks the body will probably surface, bloated with gas. We agreed that the “foamless weirs / Of age” in “Eros Turannos” are probably ocean weirs. He asked about “foamless,” a word that had bewildered me a little; I suggested that Robinson is using the old metaphor of life as a tide—maturity is high tide, but by old age the tide has withdrawn. All that remains are weirs left on the dry shore. (Arnold uses a similar image in “Dover Beach”—the Seas of Faith were full, but now one hears the “withdrawing roar” of the tide retreating across the “naked shingles.”) *** Sometimes a kind soul praises my criticism and asks me to comment on a manuscript. I’m not sure my counsel has ever done anyone any good but, faced with this awkward situation, the only sensible thing for me to do is run like hell. The few times I’ve weakened in my resolve, I’ve regretted it. There was a pharmacist—at least, I think he was a pharmacist—who, when I had been insufficiently robust in my refusals, sent me a batch of a dozen or so poems. The next day, another batch of poems hit the doormat, poems he’d written since mailing me the manuscript the day before. The third day, a new batch arrived, this time with pictures of the man and his little son. I returned all three batches, told him he was a genius and that he should lose my address before I called the cops. After that, I adopted an invariable rule. An Edmund Wilson rule. I don’t look at manuscripts. Once a lawyer asked if I’d comment on a few of his poems. I said I’d be glad to, if he’d give me a retainer of $1000 and allow me to bill him at $250 per hour, with a minimum charge of four hours. He was shocked. My temerity served its purpose—I didn’t have to look at the poems. Think about the curiosity. A lawyer doesn’t like to hand out free legal advice. He charges somewhere between $150 and $500 an hour for his time. If you call him up, he’ll bill you for a quarter-hour, even when the phone call takes three minutes. Yet he wants some poor schmuck of a poetry critic, who’s lucky to get $500 for a book review that takes three weeks to write, to pronounce on his poems gratis. When people send me books, I put them on the shelf and read them when preparing the next chronicle. I don’t read every book all the way through. I look at about 150 a year, and I read them until I know whether I’m going to review them or not. I read at least ten pages, and in most get halfway through. I read half the books cover to cover. *** I don’t refuse to look at manuscripts because I like being unkind. I refuse because I’m incapable of lying about poetry. (Poetry is far too trivial to lie about.) Poets who send you manuscripts never really want you to be honest. They want to hear that they are undiscovered geniuses. I don’t think my refusal praiseworthy, however; indeed, it’s despicable. The critic’s nightmare is named Thomas Wentworth Higginson. What if, in your kindness, you agreed to look at a few verses by a young poet? Would you know if they were works of genius, or would you go down in literary history as the critic who read but could not see? Higginson was a kind man, an honest man. He wasn’t capable of seeing that Emily Dickinson was something entirely new. Indeed, there may not have been a poet of any standing who could have seen what she was. Every critic fears he is a Higginson and every poet hopes to be a Dickinson. There may be, once a century or so, a Dickinson born to blush unseen; but that means about twelve hundred acres of flowers with no sweetness to waste on the desert air. In the Internet age, with every man his own printing press and press agent, every man capable of plastering his poems across the screens of thousands or tens of thousands of readers, you have to work very hard to be entirely unseen. *** I saw the movie Running with Scissors this week, which had some appalling performances by actors I respect, Gwyneth Paltrow (cold and pouty, her worst manner) and Brian Cox (who had the rags of scenery stuck between his teeth). Watching it was more painful than watching a vivisection; indeed, rather than see it again I’d volunteer to be vivisected myself. The one actor who emerged ennobled by this self-indulgent exercise in film was Annette Bening, who could have graced another twenty movies in the past decade, had she wanted to work. She played a woman convinced that she is destined to become a famous poet. The world’s silence merely encourages her, her rejection letters an excuse—she’s found by her son cutting them into abstract shapes—to decoupage the kitchen table. Later in the film, she starts a poetry group of housewives, which gives her the chance to be unremittingly cruel about her neighbors’ poems. I know, I know. She sounds like a poetry critic. Movies often make trivial historical mistakes—there’s a mean pleasure in catching a hairstyle too bouffant for its period or noting that a movie about the Depression uses dollar bills printed after 1963, when the design of the obverse changed (another thing prop designers forget is that until 1929 dollar bills were larger in size). At the movies, a dentist looks at the actors’ teeth (Annette Bening’s lowers are so crooked she might secretly be British—they’re as cross-rigged as Keira Knightley’s), and a carpenter at baseboards. Myself, I try to read the titles on a set’s bookshelves; and I watch details like the rejection letter Bening receives from The New Yorker. Howard Moss was poetry editor of The New Yorker in the early ‘70s, when part of the movie is set. The envelope Bening opened contained no manuscript, and it wasn’t a self-addressed envelope—it was a New Yorker envelope. The first is an error, the second perhaps not. Moss was a very kind man who generally returned a manuscript two weeks after it was sent. When he accepted my first poem, I thought it meant I didn’t have to send self-addressed stamped envelopes any more. In the months during which I labored under this delusion, my rejected poems arrived in New Yorker envelopes, with a letter that ended, “I can’t seem to find your envelope.” Eventually I took the hint. Moss’s letters were on small pieces of stationery, probably so he didn’t have to write longer letters. He would never have forgotten to include a poet’s manuscript; but, had someone like Bening not included a self-addressed stamped envelope, he would no doubt have used the house stationery. *** The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. Steven Wright said that. The poet isn’t the second bird. The poet is the first mouse. He dies looking forward to a bite of cheese. <& /poetrycomp/journal-friday.comp, day=>"Friday" &> I’ve come to the last station on the spur line, where the conductor is going to toss me off the observation platform, perhaps into a handy swamp. As I child, I rode the Edaville Railroad through cranberry bogs south of Boston. This privately owned narrow-gauge used to steam five miles or more into the bogs; the old line, having been closed for years, has reopened with a smaller section of track and without the old engines. As a child, I found steam engines more a real railway than the sleek sleeping cars I’d taken from Boston to Philadelphia. I was in my thirties before I knew that my father’s father’s father had driven locomotives on the Pennsylvania Railroad. My great-grandfathers were a cross-section of 19th-century life in the North. On my mother’s side, outside Boston, one owned a livery stable and the other was proprietor of a failed grocery. On my father’s, in Pittsburgh, one was a locomotive engineer and the other a river rat who became chief engineer of the steamboat Boaz, which plied the Ohio. My grandfathers were both salesmen. One started at fourteen and became eastern sales manager for Quaker Oats. The other, having graduated from Carnegie-Mellon, declined into drink and a series of wasted jobs. My father was a salesman. I write poetry. Hart Crane’s father invented the Lifesaver candy. Louise Glück’s invented the X-Acto knife. *** On Awards Every fall I go out to Tucson to see a friend. The Tucson sky, when clear, is the color of turquoise. I don’t know how the town fathers manage to dye it that color, but I compliment them. Tucson is surrounded on all sides by mountains—the Santa Catalina to the north, the Rincon the east, the Santa Rita to the south, the Tucson to the west. Geologically it looks impossible, but I never bet against geology. I like a town that offers a mountain in every direction (I live the rest of the year on the old seabed that is Florida or in the fens of England)—Wordsworth would have loved Tucson. My friend in Tucson keeps an Oscar hidden under the cushions of his couch. He was young when he received his first nomination (that time, he lost), which he framed and hung in his bathroom. He has developed a sensible attitude toward awards. Poets who write for awards are idiots. Poets who want awards are idiots. Look at the Pulitzers from the thirties: Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost, George Dillon, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Hillyer, Audrey Wurdemann, Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Robert Frost (again), Marya Zaturenska, John Gould Fletcher. One poet of the first rank, two or three of the third, and then oblivion. You don’t see Pound or Eliot or Stevens or Moore or Williams. If you think the poets awarded the prize in the nineties will fair better, think again. I’m not saying you shouldn’t accept awards. It’s rude not to accept something people give you. Perhaps every award should be replaced with a saguaro cactus. *** My theory about publishing poetry is so depressing, I’d rather not put it on the page. Here goes. Take the trade and university presses, and the better independents. The first year, I suspect most poetry books sell between 500 and 1000 copies. Let’s say 750. Perhaps 250 of these go to libraries, where ten get taken out and read. (By this I mean read cover to cover. Otherwise it’s not reading; it’s browsing.) Two hundred are bought at readings or by fond friends and ignorant relatives. Of these copies, 20 might be read (if we’re talking about my relatives, the figure is lower). The remaining 300 copies are bought by the few people in the country who read poetry, and of these fifty copies might be read. By my count, the book gets fewer than 100 readers the first year. Perhaps the book receives one or two reviews (an editor told me that half the books he publishes—this is a New York publisher—get no reviews at all.) The second year is worse. Now the book sells 30 copies, of which perhaps five are read. The books in the libraries gather another 10 or 20 readers. The third year the book sells 15 copies, or is remaindered. After six or seven years, the public library copies get sent to the Friends of the Library sale. The university library copies gather dust. My advice is, if you want to write poetry, learn to love silence. Say, then, that in three years, in a country of 300,000,000, a book of poetry sells 800 copies. You could search through five football stadiums, each seating 75,000, before you could find one buyer. If I’m correct that only about 100 of those buyers finish a book of poetry, you’d have to search through 40 stadiums to find even one person who had read the book. We live in a minor art. That doesn’t mean we love it the less, or hate it the less. There are exceptions; but—let’s be honest—few poets selling ten or twenty thousand copies will be of any interest 50 years later. There were dozens of poets who sold much better than the young Eliot or Pound. Stevens’s Harmonium sold so poorly it was remaindered for 50 cents a copy. If you sell a lot of books and want a lasting reputation, hope that you’re Robert Frost. *** Lisa Kilczewski asks where in poetry I “find wisdom about the meaning of life, loss, aging, fear, and dying.” I’m not sure, in my hunkering atheistic way, I understand the question. I don’t look to the poem’s content for the meanings of life, or for consolation in the losses life demands. I find solace in the language itself, in the way meaning plays through syntax and form, in the blink of wordplay or the cocked gesture of the well-turned phrase. I don’t say there isn’t meaning to be had—I can’t read a passage of Shakespeare without feeling instructed in mysteries, both in the language and in what the language says. (The King James version of the Bible does that, too—though the supernatural parts have no meaning for me. I read it as Oscar Wilde did, to find how things come out.) For me, though, the life of poetry is the language. Donne, and Coleridge, and Emily Dickinson, and Robert Lowell, and Geoffrey Hill touch me that way. There are recognitions of the small and sidelong in life in Hardy, in Larkin, in Bishop, in Justice that I find nowhere else; but, for me—and I hope this sounds radical—the life carries the language, not the other way around. The language doesn’t hold the meaning; the language is the meaning.
Epilogue: Coronado Beach, California
In a hotel room by the sea, the Master Sits brooding on the continent he has crossed. Not that he foresees immediate disaster, Only a sort of freshness being lost— Or should he go on calling it Innocence? The sad-faced monsters of the plains are gone; Wall Street controls the wilderness. There’s an immense Novel in all this waiting to be done, But not, not—sadly enough—by him. His talents, Such as they may be, want an older theme, One rather more civilized than this, on balance. For him now always the consoling dream Is just the mild dear light of Lamb House falling Beautifully down the pages of his calling.
                                       —Donald Justice
I knew an old woman who had taught herself English, having arrived at Ellis Island in the twenties, by reading Shakespeare in the New York Public Library. She ran the bookstore near Skidmore, before the college moved to the edge of town. When I met her, during a stay at Yaddo in 1975, her husband was dying and she was scraping out a living selling books and pencils from the front room of her house. When her husband died, she told me, “For the first time in my life, I tried to read Shakespeare and it meant nothing.” There are times when even poetry is not enough. *** My last words on poetry: I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/dispatches/journals/06.11.03.html http://poetryfoundation.org/dispatches/journals/06.11.03.html Fri, 03 Nov 2006 11:35:56 -0600