National Poetry Month: Dorothea Lasky

On Poetry
April 24, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 11 5 min read

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Dorothea Lasky is the author of AWE and the forthcoming Black Life. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, American Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, Fou, Columbia Poetry Review, A Public Space, and Absent, among other places. Currently, she studies creativity and education at the University of Pennsylvania. Videos of her reading her poems can be found on www.birdinsnow.com.

A line of poetry by Dorothea: “There is no poem that will bring back the dead”

The Poetic “Project” (And Other Poetry-Associated Terms I Hate)

It seems that many poets these days often refer to an entire body of work by one poet as a “project.” I remember once hearing a poet friend of mine use the term “project” as he introduced another poet at a reading. He went on and on: “Her project echoes Dickinson’s project blah blah…” etc. The comparison seemed fine, but I wasn’t really sure the poet in question really had a “project” per se. I don’t think poems work that way. I think poems come from the earth and the mind and work from the ground up. That is to say, I think a poet intuits a poem and a scientist conducts a “project.” I don’t know. That seems wrong, too. But I do think there is a distinction.

I really do hate this term, “project.” The crux of my problem with it comes from fundamental questions of creativity. Questions like, “Where does the creation of a poem come from: the outside of a person or the inside?” The line between the two is fuzzy, especially in a poem. I can say that I don’t think that Dickinson had a project, nor did the contemporary poet my friend was referring to. Emily Dickinson was a pretty tough woman who wrote poems because that’s what she was meant to do. I don’t think her reality included the idea of poems as fitting into a “project.” The word constricts the immense body of work that she has left us.

I get it. The term “project” comes from the visual art world. And other worlds too, like science, business, and education. But especially from the visual art world. And if there is one thing that poets would like to be today, it’s visual artists. Why? Because visual artists have all the money. But that’s another discussion for another post. Still, having a project (and naming it) is a powerful tool. A poet with a project (who can name his project and talk about it) shows that everything was all set before he even started. A poet with a nameable project seems wise, and better than other poets with an unnameable one. But this kind of thinking strikes me as BS, because I don’t believe that’s how poetry works. When I mentioned “intuit” above – that poets intuit poems – I really meant that to create something (like a poem) means that the outside world of a poet and the internal drives within her blend and blur. But there is something so human, so instinctual about the drive, that it might be hard to be conscious of it, at every point of a poet’s career. I would argue that a poet who has a project that he can lucidly discuss is a pretty boring poet, at best. I would argue that a poet with a project might not be a poet at all. Or at least a baby poet, not a great one. (And yes, there are great poets alive today, David Orr. Sheesh.) I would argue that a poet who says he has a project probably has no sense of the idea of habitus and its intersection with the act of creation. Yeah. I think the term “project” has nothing to do with poetry.

The notion of a poetic “project” may actually be very toxic to poetry. The term seems to suggest to young poets that a poet can set about his life path knowing what he is doing at all times. And to tell a young poet that is to make him feel like he has to know how to create both a project and a poem. It’s hard enough to create a poem. If he is destined to be a great poet, he will never know what his project really was, no matter what he says it is, was, or what he might imagine it could be.

I am sure that many might argue with me about this idea, especially on a surface level. (And I know this very idea sits on a public website, so no doubt there will be at least a few people who will get all up in arms about some superficial slant to this idea.) But I have a project, you nimwit! some people might say. Oh, and the origin of the term “project” in the context of poetry happened around the time that DADA…[snooze]

But as poets, we need our own terms. New terms. How do we go about our business of writing? What is it like? Let’s write about that. A lot. Let’s pool our ideas together and figure out what consistencies there are among us in terms of practice. Maybe we will find a meta-act in creation that is much like a “project” in the way many of us use that term. But let it be a subtle distinction, one that is characteristic to the way we create, for real. Let’s be special for once. In the context of bankers, lawyers, scientists, painters, musicians, we’re poets. Let’s have a little pride. And let’s be gentle when describing our skills to the outside world, so that they can understand us better and we can give each other what we need.

This is probably not the place to say this, but I hate certain other words when used today in the discussion of poetry as well. Like “project,” I get kind of turned off when poets refer to groups of poets collaborating together as “communities.” In 2009, a “poetry community” usually means a bunch of people who hardly know each other communicating on a listserve or blog. That’s great, but that’s not a community. That’s some other term, yet to be determined. A community is a bunch of people living around each other, helping each other out with their living. As in actually helping each other out. A community is a family, a big regional, reciprocal one. And family, even in our internet age, really does mean more than g-chatting. It means cooking and loving and providing for, in real living ways.

I guess some might argue that the times when I hear the word community used in the context of poetry today, people are actually referring to a bunch of poets living near each other doing these things and so, the term community is actually the correct term. I guess that’s okay then. But then, isn’t that a “scene?” I hate the word “scene,” too, but less than I did in my youth. As I get older, I realize the value in that word. As I get older, and the practical realities of life set in, I want more and more to be with a group of people in a bookstore somewhere, acting cool. I long for those days. The sunglasses, the lunches, The Golden Book of Words. The ironic way we thought we knew we were better than everyone else in the whole world. We were poets after all. Now those are the days I long for.

More National Poetry Month at The Millions

is the author of Black Life and AWE, both out from Wave Books. Currently she lives in New York City. She can be found online at www.birdinsnow.com.

On Poetry

Machine Gun Sonnets

On Poetry
June 10, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 4 8 min read
In a few years, much of the Western World will, for lack of a better word, celebrate the Centennial of The Great War in Europe from 1914-1918, the anniversary of that one round that loosed trillions more and signaled the death knell for societies and cultures once so steeped in the fine notions of romance and art. The First World War has long intrigued scholars in many fields, but one of the most interesting and unifying aspects of the conflict remains its many dichotomies: the way in which the arcane and the modern clashed in a manner that, unto that point in history, had never been seen before. Enter a new world where tactics so lagged behind the technologies of war that dragoons armed with lances and gasmasks charged headlong against entrenched machine gun nests; where the gentlemanly rules of Old World combat, devised by generals still under the illusion that great men, rather than great machines, achieved victory were put out to pasture and left to die; where educated and idealistic young men wrote of mustard gas and aerial bombardment using sonnets and couplets. The Great War ushered in a unique milieu of poets—educated and romantic, yet fully modern—who, although they endured all the horrors of industrialized and mechanized warfare, retreated to a forms better suited to Tennyson and his Light Brigade to describe it. This amazingly odd juxtaposition carved World War One poetry a definite niche in the collective literary mindset; no other literary moment, for movement would be too strong a word to ascribe to a mere four years whose overall reputation has been solidified by two or three truly notable and highly antithetical figures, has spoken so drastically to two sides of a popular consciousness. Furthermore, the primary figure come to embody this period, Wilfred Owen, only suffered to have his work “discovered” and celebrated during the commemoration of the war’s 50th anniversary, which brought with it a renewed interest in scholarship for both the war and those who wrote during it. To that end, it can and has been argued that Owen’s place in the pantheon of war poets rests not on the merits of his words or his skill at turning a phrase but because the tenor of his voice fit precisely with an age quickly turning against the idea that war can ever again be glorious or that it ever was an altruistic endeavor in the first place. To imagine a 1960s community of academics and then contemporary poets lauding over the works of Kipling and the once highly celebrated Rupert Brooke, the former capable of such a horrendously puerile take on the actual carnage about to befall the continent: For all we have and are, For all our children’s fate, Stand up and take the war, The Hun is at the gate! and of further asking that one “Face the naked days/In silent fortitude” because There is but on task for all— One life for each to give. Who stands if Freedom fall? Who dies if England live? flies in the face of all social mores soon to dominate the landscape of counterculture England and America. Owen, although only five of his poems were published before his death in 1918, stood as the main antithesis to this jingoistic sentiment, and he has since not only come to dominate the conversation of Great War poets, but also managed a place in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, where he rests beside his friend Siegfried Sassoon—another notable poetic dissenter— and, to a lesser extent, the aforementioned Brooke, who at the outset of the war, and even a few years after its cessation, appeared as the poster child for all that was right and good with the young men of the Empire. But politics and agenda aside, what is rather interesting is the range and scope of First World War poetry, for war poetry has never been a mode of discourse possessing a long shelf life. It is not the thing that complements a sunny afternoon, and while there is a decent tradition in American letters of the war novel, A Farewell to Arms, The Naked and the Dead, The Thin Red Line and The Things They Carried all immediately come to mind, these works often arrive long after the final salvo, tend to be imbued with the cult of the author’s persona and to be written from the safety and distance of time, free from the possibility that a sniper bullet might arrest the author mid couplet; whereas the poems of the Great War, for the most part, exist devoid of ego and communicate a collective rather than personal mindset. As Patrick MacGill writes in the final quatrain of “Before the Charge:” The dead leaves float in the sighing air,   The darkness moves like a curtain drawn, A veil which the morning sun will tear   From the face of death.—We charge at dawn Together, reads the unwritten and inferable coda; and together we die. Still, perhaps the solution to this great paradox, that of Great War poetry’s resilience, lies in the simple fact that if World War II was the last “noble war,” then the Great War was the last chivalrous one, for no other modern conflict possesses the same aura of romance that ironically informs a three and a half year stalemate, where men smeared with mud lived amongst vermin and dead bodies in glorified holes in the ground while suffering exposure to the capricious weather known to suddenly befall Western Europe. In essence, World War One poetry is both the merging of art and suffering at its highest form and a controlled, packaged image of it. Through a masterful slight of hand and a brilliant bit of marketing on the part of those in literary offices away from the moonscapes of the Marne and Ypres, our popular consciousness has acquiesced to transform the craven hell of a No-Man’s-Land ripe with corpses splayed like scarecrows on barbed wire into “We are the dead. Short days ago/We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow/Loved and were loved, and now we lie/In Flanders fields,” which gives the impression that these Belgian poppy fields of John McCrae might not be that bad of a place after all. However, in their own strange way, these poets and their poems would have served as a form of reportage for those back home. In the days before twenty-four hour news networks and instantaneous headlines, where radio was in its infancy and print served as the primary mechanism for disseminating information, to read a poem from a lad in a trench alongside the “hard reporting” from Verdun or the Somme would not have seemed out of the ordinary or a mixing of two, now distinctly different media. In fact, it would have been the poem that carried a greater weight, since it was offered by a primary source, one whose heart was both loyal to the Crown and yet burdened with the terrible weight of service to it. The warring poet, therefore, easily represented the very best the Empire had to offer because what cannot be forgotten is the social fabric that enabled such a war to take place and for it to be populated with a relatively erudite—by historical and possibly even modern standards—average fighting man who would have benefited from the recent schooling reforms instituted under the reign of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Much of this learning would have centered around an understanding of literature in a national context, poems which, according to Elizabeth A. Marsland in The Nation’s Cause: French, English and German Poetry of the First World War, were “the nation’s treasury of patriotic and heroic poems.” Thus it dovetails that by August 1914 a generation of young men educated on Byron, who himself went off to an ignoble yet glorious death in Greece, should not aspire to a similar end. The poet martyr or, as George Walter calls it in his introduction to The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry the “Brooke Myth,” born through the death of Brooke (who ironically never saw action on the Western Front, instead dying of blood poisoning in the Aegean) relies on the trope of “that selfless young literary patriot who heeded his country’s call, only to die tragically and heroically when his promise seemed about to be fulfilled.” This early 20th Century interpretation of the tragic hero came to serve as foundation for an aesthetic disseminated to a market eager to read the massive outpouring of war poetry coming from the trenches of France, as well as serving as a means by which, in the early stages of the war, members of the media and the government could guide the national morale and sustain the recruitment of the troop levels needed to continuously refill ever thinning ranks. It is this ideal, this myth of the lyric warrior, that strikes to the heart of Great War poetry, which even during its 1960s resurgence never jettisoned the notion of the poetic martyr but reappropriated it to one better suited to an evolving, more realistic social mindset, resulting in a transition from the ‘For God and Country’ mentality of Brooke: If I should die, think only this of me:     That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be     In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,     Gave, once, her flowers to live, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air,     Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. to the haunting, humanist reproach of Owen’s famed “Dulce et Decorum est:” If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs Bitten as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. How then, are we to judge the legacy of this literary time period, at once naïve and world-weary? How does it continue to inform a modern consciousness that might easily look back fondly on a time when wars were “good or bad” and enemies were defined? For even after Adorno decried it, both high and popular culture has persisted in looking to the arts for an understanding of the horrific by attempting to render the irrational accessible to the rational mind. Great War poetry serves as just that, a snapshot of a bygone era coming to grips with its misconceptions and imperfections, an example of men trying to communicate sights and sounds beyond comprehension using the only means at their disposal, but to ever imagine our society returning to a space where it would be imaginable for a grunt or Jarhead to compose the “Kandahar Sonnets” and to have them run on the front page of The New York Times or The San Francisco Chronicle is beyond laughable; it is absurd, especially if they should carry even the slightest hint of anything resembling patriotism. The war poem is obsolete in a world become too cynical for such an item, too intelligent to buy into such a jingoistic cliché. Or might it just be a blatant apathy, one born from a glorious remove, both physical and psychological, from all aspects of Operation Iraqi Freedom or of an Afghanistan Campaign being fought by faceless men in fatigues, who hump through the dusty foothills of the Hindu Kush remembered, as people, only by the loved ones or close friends stateside who anticipate their return. Even in its most ignorant form, the poems of the Great War possess a legitimacy absent from the similar artistic pursuits today, which tend to be relegated to the back lots of Hollywood and undertaken by actors whose true knowledge of conflict comes from however much they might absorb from the technical advisor brought on set to guarantee “authenticity.” Instead, what these poems of the Great War offer is an immediacy, for they are not prey to the trickery of memories sulking in a truth distorted, no matter how slightly. Today, with nearly a century behind them, we allow the works of Owen and Sassoon and Brooke to masquerade as art, as historical iconography, but the idea and legacy of Great War Poetry, and of its serialization in major newspapers during the actual maneuvers on the Western Front, serves as a sobering reminder that war is fought by human beings. In their worst forms, the Great War Poems are not an apology for fighting, nor are they at their best calls for its cessation. Rather, they are evidence that even a human being who holds a gun and has been trained to kill is capable of intelligent and philosophical thought, perhaps even more capable than those who sit safely at home and examine them.
On Poetry
| 1 book mentioned 4 8 min read
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On Poetry

Dream a Little Dream of Me: John Berryman

On Poetry
April 12, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 9 15 min read
If poetry is going to be tortured, agonized, and morbidly introspective, it might as well be funny too. John Berryman’s The Dream Songs are all that and more. Half elegiac lyricism and half lowdown buffoonery, they’re like nothing else in American literature, though they owe a debt to Saul Bellow’s breakthrough mixture of high and low in The Adventures of Auggie March. (The two men shared an office at the University of Minnesota in the 1950s. Can you imagine being an undergraduate there and making a routine appointment to discuss your C+ with Mr. Bellow or Mr. Berryman?) Although I can’t claim to understand The Dream Songs fully, I'm not required to. No one said it better than Berryman himself: “These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand./They are only meant to terrify & comfort.” Reading all 385 of them at a stretch (not recommended), I sometimes find myself bored as well as baffled. This too is allowed: Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles. Perhaps the first thing to be said about The Dream Songs is that there are too many of them. By my reckoning (every reader’s will differ), fewer than half are truly first-rate or even intelligible, yet the good ones wouldn’t be so good if not set off by the messiness and prolixity of the others -- and even the good ones are pretty messy too. It took Berryman years to break through to the mess that allowed life in. He served his apprenticeship under the ideal of formal severity and impersonality bequeathed by the gods of modernism. Not that he ever surrendered the modernist ideal of difficulty. Them Dream Songs isn’t easy, pal. But although their elisions and allusions seem to invite the sort of interpretive ingenuity that used to make academic careers, they succeed best when speaking more or less clearly about the elemental things: love, lust, friendship, death, despair, memory, and John Berryman. John Berryman isn’t exactly a veiled presence in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953), the major work that preceded The Dream Songs, but that strange narrative poem of 57 stanzas does give us something rarely encountered in his work thereafter: other consciousnesses. It’s true that friends, lovers, wives, children, students, rivals, doctors, nurses, mothers, and murderers populate The Dream Songs, but their appearances are always and openly grist for “Henry’s” -- that is, Berryman’s -- mill, objects in his psychic landscape. It’s also true that the Anne Bradstreet he brings into being is as much Berryman’s alter-ego or freely imaged object of desire as the actual Puritan poet who married at 16, crossed the Atlantic in 1630, bore eight children, wrote some of the earliest verse in America, and died at the age of 60 in 1672. Nevertheless, he was too much a scholar not to give a convincing sense of Puritan culture and the people who inhabited it. No scholar alone, however, would have dared to create an interior life for his protagonist the way that Berryman does. It’s hard to imagine the Harvard historian Perry Miller, for example, whose studies of Puritan thought and culture Berryman drew on heavily, trying to get inside the head of a woman in labor, as Berryman does in the stanzas describing the birth of Anne’s first child. (Another part of his research consisted of asking extremely intimate questions of mothers that he knew, including his own.) Magnificent in itself, this celebrated sequence is also a useful corrective to those who believe that the adulterous, alcoholic, sexist, self-involved male poet couldn’t write about anything but his own consciousness: Monster you are killing me Be sure I’ll have you later Women do endure I can can no longer and it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me drencht & powerful, I did it with my body! One proud tug greens Heaven. Marvellous, unforbidding Majesty. Swell, imperious bells. I fly. Nevertheless, the adulterous, alcoholic, sexist, self-involved male poet did write primarily about his own consciousness, and in The Dream Songs, to return to his signature work, he did so over the course of about 400 pages and 7,000 lines. The question almost asks itself: Why should any of us struggle with 400 pages of fractured, nonlinear verse describing one mid-20th-century white academic’s private torments, not excluding details of a hemorrhage in his left ear and much grousing about the weather? Well, if you think The Dream Songs are excessively self-involved, try Love & Fame (1971), which goes on and on and on about insanely trivial matters, as if daring the reader to find the poetry in this mass of congealed autobiography. It’s there if you look hard enough, but some of the verse is so hilariously awful it must be intentional, as in this reminiscence about Berryman’s college years: I must further explain: I needed a B, I didn’t need an A, as in my other six courses, but the extra credits accruing from those A’s would fail to accrue if I'd any mark under B. The bastard knew this, as indeed my predicament was well known through both my major Departments. Unlike The Dream Songs, Love & Fame is meant all too clearly to be understood. It’s so lucid, in fact -- a scrupulously detailed bildungsroman in verse -- that most of the poetry gets lost in the glare. No one ever accused The Dream Songs of being too lucid. At their frequent worst, they are so clotted with private reference as to be impenetrable. Any poem that requires an annotation like the following (from John Berryman: A Critical Commentary by John Haffenden) plainly doesn’t give a damn whether it’s penetrable or not: The ‘Little Baby’ is Berryman’s daughter Martha; Diana, the daughter of Kate Berryman’s friend, Eugenia Foster. ‘The Beast’ is the nickname given to the boy who lived next door to them in Lansdowne Park, Ballsbridge, Dublin. ‘Mir’ is the family name for Berryman’s mother. Furthermore -- to get the bad stuff out of the way -- even if Songs were consistently successful, they would still suffer from the defect of most uniform poetic sequences: too much of a good thing. If Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets begin ever so slightly to pall, Berryman’s 385 sonnet-like Songs -- 18 iambic lines divided into stanzas of six, six, and six, with varying rhymes and half lines, usually in the middle and end of each strophe -- can hardly escape a similar but much heavier numbing effect. There is, of course, a fairly simple solution to this problem -- don’t read them straight through. Although there are sequences within the sequence, the ordering has no organizational principle that holds for long. You could read them backwards and do almost as well. Another difficulty is the minstrel dialect that Berryman mixes with the slang, jokes, baby talk, impossible grammar, and syntactic inversions. Readers of modern poetry are accustomed to such unstable compounds, but the appropriation of an idiom associated with racial oppression induces squirms, and is meant to. At least I hope it’s meant to. Sometimes I'm not so sure. I feel a little better knowing that Berryman’s friend Ralph Ellison had no problem with the blackface dialect and especially admired Song 68, which deals in part with the death of Bessie Smith. I guess I’ll always have some qualms, but would anyone really prefer The Dream Songs to be shorn of their outrages to decorum and taste? Don’t we read them partly because they’re so unlike what “great” poetry is supposed to be? The half-lunatic syntax serves many purposes -- chiefly, the subversion of psychological defenses preventing access to primal guilts, fears, needs, and shames, or as Kafka might have said, the taking of an ax to the frozen sea within. The Songs are, after all, inspired by dreams, where we take our clothes off and don’t speak or think the King’s English, but Henry’s language is also extremely funny, an all-American music of boisterous vulgarity. Troubled and troubling as they are, The Dream Songs give back in delighted sound what they darkly ruminate on sense. The overall tenor of the book might be roughly stated as follows: Just because we’re buffoons, it doesn’t mean our lives aren’t tragic. In the preface Berryman explains, somewhat misleadingly, that the poem “is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.” Although just enough distance exists between character and creator to allow for the writing of the book, few people believe Berryman’s disclaimer. Berryman is Henry, and Henry is, to a greater or -- let us hope -- lesser degree, us. More useful, I think, is Berryman’s statement to The Paris Review: “Henry to some extent was in the situation that we are all in in actual life -- namely, he didn’t know and I didn’t know what the bloody fucking hell was going to happen next.” This barroom wisdom underwrites every line of the book. (“Parm me, lady,” drunken Henry says to his seatmate on an airplane in Song 5. “Orright” she replies.) I might add, before I look at a few Songs, that the principle of chaos and disorder to which this wisdom attests found spectacular expression in the poet’s everyday life. According to Bellow, Berryman “knocked himself out to be like everybody else,” but despite his efforts to be a responsible husband, father, citizen, and colleague, he failed in every respect. In Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman Paul Mariani describes a fairly typical night in the life of the poet when, drunk as usual and declining out of envious pique to attend a poetry reading at Berkeley, where we was then teaching: Berryman came over to see Miriam [Ostroff, a faculty wife], chatted with her, read her some of his Dream Songs, and was soon boasting of his sexual prowess. In spite of her protests, he began chasing her around the room. When she told him to get out, he suddenly became contrite and downcast and promised to be good if only he could stay. After a short while, however, he started again, until he finally browbeat her into letting him spend “ten or fifteen minutes reverently caressing her feet, while reciting poetry.” Then, realizing that the house had windows and that someone might be watching, Berryman recovered himself, hailed a taxi, and went home. Mariani’s biography is not edifying. Out of such squalor, however, Berryman created masterpieces like Dream Song 4, Henry’s appallingly believable version of “lust in action”: Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken paprika, she glanced at me twice. Fainting with interest, I hungered back and only the fact of her husband & four other people kept me from springing on her or falling at her little feet and crying ‘You are the hottest one for years of night Henry’s dazed eyes have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon (despairing) my spumoni. – Sir Bones: is stuffed, de world, wif feeding girls. -- Black hair, complexion Latin, jeweled eyes downcast . . .  The slob beside her     feasts . . . What wonders is she sitting on, over there? The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars. Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry. -- Mr. Bones: there is. The self-disgust is palpable and -- who can doubt it? -- thoroughly earned. Why then is this poem so exceedingly funny? Perhaps because like the best of the Songs it manages to be so many things at once. There ought to be a law against Henry, but his raging sexuality doesn’t stop him from idealizing both the object of his desire and his desire itself. The funniest thing about the Song is that it exists -- a gross parody of poetic adoration that is touched with the lyricism of jeweled eyes and an apostrophized “Brilliance.” Helen Vendler writes in The Given and the Made, “We become marginally convinced, by such a poem, that the troubadours were Henrys too, and that Berryman is merely uncovering the unsalubrious, but oddly solacing, layer of psychic squalor beneath high artistic convention.” Nicely put, but somehow it sounds funnier when Henry says it. Among the adjectives Vendler applies to Henry are “regressive, petulant, hysterical, childish, cunning, hypersexual, boastful, frightened, shameless, and revengeful.” Also, “complaining, greedy, lustful, and polymorphously perverse.” Did we miss anything? How about self-pitying, irresponsible, envious, and grandiose? Vendler, who notes that Henry is simultaneously “imaginative, hilarious, mocking, and full of Joycean music,” is making an important point about the intrusion of the Freudian Id into the august precincts of lyric poetry. If Henry’s worse than we are, it’s only by a matter of degree. Why shouldn’t self-portraiture, in poetry as well as prose, allow for the base and ignoble as well as the socially approved? Maybe because I’ve written a few myself, I’ve never understood the knock on memoirs as pointless exercises in narcissism. Until we all live lives of wholly integrated personhood, there will be much to learn from the microscopic examinations of the self performed by Mary Karr or Tobias Wolff or Henry Adams or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Because The Dream Songs derive so much from the model of self-examination provided by psychotherapy (and from Berryman’s long hours in group and private sessions), they’re more uncensored than most such memoiristic exercises but are unique only in their peculiar combination of hilarity and despair. I’ve mentioned self-pity as one of the characteristic modes of Henry and his Songs. Since this particular vice isn’t going away any time soon and is, in fact, more ubiquitous than the alcoholism and lust for fame that the Songs also relate at inordinate length, I consider it wholly to Berryman’s credit that he presents Henry, in the midst of all his tribulations, feeling genuinely and unrepentantly sorry for himself. Instances aren’t hard to find: “Henry hates the world. What the world to Henry/did will not bear thought” (DS 74); “This world is gradually becoming a place/where I do not care to be any more” (DS 149); “The only happy people in the world/are those who do not have    to write long poems” (DS 354); “Mr Bones,/stop that damn dismal” (DS 98). Mr Bones never did stop that damn dismal. Berryman, who regularly assigned Miguel de Unamuno to his students, must have learned something from the Spaniard’s metaphysics of pity. In the Tragic Sense of Life, Unamuno writes, “Man yearns to be loved, or, what is the same thing, to be pitied. Man wishes others to feel and share his hardships and sorrows. The roadside beggar’s exhibition of his sores and gangrened mutilations is something more than a device to extort alms from the passer-by. True alms is pity rather than the pittance that alleviates the material hardships of life.” For Unamuno the next step in the progression is turning the pity for the self outwards, towards a universal compassion for all suffering beings. Berryman never got that far. He occupied the huge gray area where self-pity and genuine pathos blur their edges. Song 149, for instance, sounds outrageously petulant -- because Henry’s friends have died, he hates the world. Yet this petulance frames an elegy for a man whose sufferings easily surpassed Henry’s (or Berryman’s), his great friend Delmore Schwartz. A sober, chastened acceptance of death is precisely what Berryman does not provide. Henry’s refusal or inability to come to terms with necessity makes the Song doubly true -- true to the intractability of grief, and true to the memory (half solace, half torment) of a loved friend: This world is gradually becoming a place where I do not care to be any more. Can Delmore die? I don’t suppose in all them years a day went ever by without a loving thought for him. Welladay. I imagine you have heard the terrible news, that Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably & alone, in New York: he sang me a song ‘I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz Harms & the child I sing, two parents’ torts’ when he was young & gift-strong. Berryman had a lot of grieving to do in The Dream Songs -- for “Delmore,” “Randall” (Jarrell), “Richard” (Blackmur), “Louis” (MacNeice), and other friends, but mostly for himself. He too sang “Harms & the child”: his father’s suicide occurred when Berryman was 12. His unseemly bewailing of this primal wound is one of the glories of The Dream Songs. If you don’t feel sorry for yourself after a trauma like that, you’re probably damaged beyond redemption. I remember reading reviews of Flannery O’Connor’s posthumously published letters, The Habit of Being (1979), in which critic after critic marveled at her complete lack of self-pity in the face of rural isolation, degenerative illness, and overwhelming household cares. My response was more like Henry’s: What was wrong with this woman? On the other hand, who was I to judge this brave, unassuming, Roman Catholic stoic who virtually re-invented the American short story? Yet the feeling remains with me still -- if Flannery O’Connor had ever permitted herself an occasional howl of self-pity, she might have extended a similar sympathy to the freaks, half-wits, criminals, con artists, and fanatics she depicted with such icy detachment. However brilliant, she was also, in my opinion, the coldest and cruelest of all major American writers. What Berryman says about Wallace Stevens is Song 219 is partly right; he just applies it to the wrong writer. Substitute “O’Connor” for “Stevens” and it makes perfect sense: He mutter spiffy. He make wonder Henry’s wits, though, with a odd . . . something . . . something . . . not there in his flourishing art. “Better than us; less wide” is Berryman’s final and misapplied verdict on Stevens. John Berryman was emphatically not better than us (though he’s speaking here as a poet to a poet), and there was nothing narrow or “less wide” about his emotional devastations. I’ve got my own Henry-like traumas to deal with. “Get over it,” people tell me. I can’t; that’s one of the reasons why I read poetry. Since all of us are damaged to one degree or another, I regard the shameless exhibitionism of The Dream Songs as not only essential to their success but a public service. But note: the Songs are art, not therapeutic transcripts. In 384, the penultimate Song, Berryman/Henry returns to the primal scene, his father’s suicide by shotgun. After all those years, after all those Songs, no resolution or catharsis is to be hoped for. There is only the consolation of expression through form: The marker slants, flowerless, day’s almost done, I stand above my father’s grave with rage, often, often before I’ve made this awful pilgrimage to one who cannot visit me, who tore his page out: I come back for more, I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn O ho alas alas When will indifference come, I moan & rave I'd like to scrabble till I got right down away down under the grass and ax the casket open ha to see just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard we’ll tear apart the mouldering grave clothes ha then Henry will heft the ax once more, his final card, and fell it on the start. It’s no accident that this poem of violent rage and hatred adheres with strictest discipline to a rhyme scheme of abc/abc and a metric of 5-5-3/5-5-3. The visionary power so overwhelms that the regularity passes almost unnoticed, but without the regularity controlling the passion, the Song wouldn’t be nearly so overwhelming. To offer any explication of a poem so primal in its address would almost seem an impertinence. The only analogue I can think of is the climax of Luis Buñuel’s Mexican B-movie version of Wuthering Heights -- fabulously titled Abismos de Pasión -- in which Heathcliff breaks into Cathy’s crypt with an ax and is shot while holding the decomposing corpse in his arms. Out of such subterranean currents of rage and despair are our ordinary lives made. “When will indifference come?” If it had come, Berryman wouldn’t have needed to write the Songs and especially not 29, a nightmare of guilt and horror at the furthest extremity from indifference. I surely don’t understand this one fully, though it all feels sickeningly right, down to the unexplained “little cough” of the first stanza and the tantalizing/tormenting serenity of the Giotto-like figure that looms up in the second. That little cough may emanate from an imagined victim of Henry’s murderous fantasies. I myself am not bedeviled by recurring nightmares of committing violence against women, but I know how desolation and despair feel. Like this: There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart só heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good. Starts again always in Henry’s ears the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime. And there is another thing he has in mind like a grave Sienese face a thousand years would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly, with open eyes, he attends, blind. All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears; thinking. But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing. The third stanza presents a mind so disturbed as to risk foreclosing the possibility of any sympathetic response. For a moment it makes me think of all those pictures of naked little girls with penises by the “outsider” artist Henry Darger; if he hadn’t been drawing little girls, he might have been raping and murdering them. But there’s a reason Berryman called them “Dream Songs.” Their flashes of nightmarish, hallucinogenic imagery light up the darker recesses of the mind. John Berryman never hurt a fly (neither did Henry Darger), and The Dream Songs do what folk art cannot -- they illuminate rather than exemplify pathologies of the soul. They’re also pretty good at illuminating ordinary experience. John Berryman lived in the world we live in, and when he wasn’t drunk or in detox or suicidal (or even when he was), he could describe the world and his place in it with grace and wit. After all this Sturm und Drang, I'd like to close with a lovely little poem (not a Dream Song) occasioned by the birth of his son Paul in 1957. Berryman of course turned out to be a negligent and mostly absent father to the boy, but he did leave him with “A Sympathy, A Welcome” -- which excuses nothing. Whatever his feelings about his catastrophic father, I hope Paul Berryman had a happy life and that “loverhood” swung his soul like a broken bell. Feel for your bad fall how could I fail, poor Paul, who had it so good. I can offer you only: this world like a knife. Yet you’ll get to know your mother and humourless as you do look you will laugh and all the others will NOT be fierce to you, and loverhood will swing your soul like a broken bell deep in a forsaken wood, poor Paul, whose wild bad father loves you well.
On Poetry
| 1 book mentioned 9 15 min read
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In Person On Poetry

In the Company of Amy Clampitt

In Person On Poetry
March 2, 2011 | 1 book mentioned 2 8 min read
Two years ago I spent some time in Lenox, Massachusetts, at a house once owned by the poet Amy Clampitt. I slept in her bed, rifled through her books, gazed out the kitchen window at the tree by which her ashes are buried. Since 2001, the house has served as a residency for poets; as the ninth Amy Clampitt Resident Fellow, my boyfriend was awarded a six-month stay. On a January weekend I helped him move into the grey clapboard house with blue-green shutters. Just down the road, The Mount, the mansion built by Edith Wharton, stood in baronial splendor. Everything about the more intimate Clampitt house struck me as perfect: the cozy living room with its comfy upholstered chairs; the loft bedroom and writing nook overlooking the snowy street; the spare bedroom crammed with boxes of Clampitt’s manuscripts, correspondence, and photographs. We found a bin stacked with copies of Clampitt’s own books of poetry, and my boyfriend noted how cool it would be to read Amy Clampitt’s Amy Clampitt’s The Kingfisher. I reluctantly caught the bus back to New York, where I had an M.F.A. thesis to write. This meant churning out and polishing short stories, and also producing a critical essay. I decided to write about Clampitt. Now I had an excuse for riding the Greyhound to Lenox as often as possible: I had research to do. But I immediately ran into trouble. I wanted to write about both Clampitt’s poetry and her house, but what was the connection between the two? Clampitt, who grew up in Iowa and spent most of her adult life in New York City, bought the house in Lenox when she was seventy-two, after winning a MacArthur grant. The places that loom large in her poems are primarily the rural landscapes of her childhood, the Manhattan streets of her adulthood, the Maine beaches where she vacationed in the summer, and the Europe of her travels—not the Berkshire towns along the Housatonic River. Six months after Clampitt moved to Lenox, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She died a year and a half later. On one of her bookshelves, between Dickens and Howard Moss, I found a spiral-bound workbook called Chemotherapy and You. Some of the pages were paper-clipped, marked for use. In a piece here at The Millions, Luke Epplin discusses his visit to Pablo Neruda’s house in Isla Negra. This house “is exceptional among existing writers’ houses,” Epplin observes, in that Neruda “managed to shape it into a manifestation of what a life dedicated to poetry might look like.” The design of the house, the attention to detail, the arrangement of treasured possessions—all seem to capture the spirit of the writer of Odes to Common Things. But even as he enjoys seeing the house as an extension of Neruda’s poetic sensibility, Epplin is suspicious of the way that such museums tend to present a limited portrait of the writers who once lived there. In his critique of the literary tourism industry, he calls on Anne Trubek’s recently published A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses, a book I find charming, if a bit oddly conceived. Trubek spends a lot of time describing places that irritate her. She finds writers’ houses that have been turned into museums dispiriting and even dumb. “[T]hey aim to do the impossible: to make physical—to make real—acts of literary imagination. Going to a writer’s house is a fool’s errand. We will never find our favorite characters or admired techniques within these houses; we can’t join Huck on the raft or experience Faulkner’s stream of consciousness. We can only walk through empty rooms full of pitchers and paintings and stoves.” But she keeps going, reporting on her half-hearted treks around the country with a curmudgeon’s pleasure in disparaging what she sees. The first writer’s house she visits is the Walt Whitman House in Camden, New Jersey, where Whitman published three editions of Leaves of Grass and an autobiography, Specimen Days. Whitman died in this house, but, Trubek notes, “The house is set up, as are most house museums, to fool us into thinking that Whitman was still living there.” His things, or replicas of his things, are staged in a way that Trubek finds false. Though writers’ houses are meant to make their former inhabitants come alive, Trubek observes, “They remind me of death.” In Lenox I became friendly with the poet Karen Chase, a great friend of Clampitt’s in the last few years of her life, and one of her literary executors. Karen was at Clampitt’s bedside when she died. We talked about this one morning in the kitchen of the house that Karen helped to furnish, taking her friend on “junking” trips to local antique stores. Karen told me that after the funeral the cleaning lady set up a little memorial to Clampitt: a table with a doily and an arrangement of Clampitt’s books, along with books by Edith Wharton. “I sort of messed it up,” Karen said with a touch of pride. “It was museum-like. It would have gone against her grain in the deepest way.” Trying to learn who Clampitt was (or Amy, as I really thought of her, longing for intimacy), I stared at the framed photograph of a woman both lanky and pixie-like, prim and hippieish, standing in a whirl of autumn leaves. I read her letters, filled with descriptions of European trips and anti-war rallies, the books on her nightstand and the flowers in her window box. And of course I read the four books that make up her Collected Poems, mostly on bus trips between Manhattan and Lenox. I was pleased to think of Clampitt herself, suddenly a poet in demand in her sixties, riding Greyhound to give readings and lectures. The poems that struck me the most, the poems I decided to focus on in my M.F.A. thesis essay, were her portraits of the dead, at once somber and lovely. “A Winter Burial” describes a woman’s death, which seems as lonely as her time in a nursing home: . . . one nightfall when the last weak string gave way that had held whatever she was, that mystery, together, the bier that waited—there were no planes coming in, not many made it to the funeral, the blizzard had been so bad, the graveyard drifted so deep, so many severed limbs of trees thrown down, they couldn’t get in to plow an opening for the hearse, or shovel the cold white counterpane from that cell in the hibernal cupboard, till the day after. This is bleak, indeed: an old forgotten woman literally buried even deeper by a snowstorm. Still, the music of the poem—those lovely incantatory final lines—dignifies the death in a way, placing it not in a sterile box, but in a space of privacy that the snow-covered earth allows. Clampitt’s poems memorialize the dead not by portraying the person who once lived, but by paying acute attention to place, sometimes places where the subject died or is buried, sometimes places that invoke the relentless flow of time and history. One of her most famous poems, “A Procession at Candlemas,” observes, “Sooner or later / every trek becomes a funeral procession.” She’s also wise to the way that paying tribute to a place can profane it, the kind of thing that troubles Trubek. “Amherst” refers to the worshippers who flock to Emily Dickinson’s house on the anniversary of her death: “the wistful, / the merely curious, in her hanging dress discern / an ikon; her ambiguities are made a shrine, / then violated.” Clampitt includes herself in this group: “we’ve drunk champagne above her grave, declaimed / the lines of one who dared not live aloud.” She wants to address her—“(Dear Emily, though, / seems too intrusive, Dear Miss Dickinson too prim)”—even as she knows this makes her part of the adoring crowd that reduces the woman to literary icon. As an alternative to preserving a writer’s house, Trubek suggests greater attention to his or her work. Reflecting on the plans to restore Langston Hughes’ former house in Cleveland’s Fairfax neighborhood, she asks, “Why not redirect our energy to reading Hughes rather than restoring his house . . . ? His books are plentiful and inexpensive. It would not be cost prohibitive to give every resident of Fairfax a book, or every teacher a classroom set of, say, Poetry for Young People.” After visiting Louisa May Alcott’s house, one of an exhausting number of literary sites in Concord, Massachusetts, Trubek reflects, “Here’s what I wish for Alcott, today: Her books assigned in schools as often as are Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye; her reputation remade into that of the tortured romantic genius; it would also be nice to have a foundation in her honor dedicated to offering women writers grants or scholarships for female writers.” To promote the work, to elevate the status of a woman writer, to support other writers: these are worthy goals, and the Clampitt House, in its quiet way, fosters them. While the lavish Mount down the road lets tourists see where Wharton wrote The House of Mirth and other novels, perhaps increasing the readership of these books, it could be argued that the Clampitt House is better for writers (if only, so far, eleven of them) by providing a place to stay rent-free for an extended period of time and get work done. I imagine Trubek would approve of the Clampitt House: not a memorial, but a practical living space. I don’t think Clampitt envisioned that her house would one day serve, in her name, as a temporary home for other poets. Her husband, who lived for seven years after her death, came up with the idea for the residency program. I do know that she had some romantic ideas about the former dwelling places of writers she admired. In her essay “A Poet’s Henry James,” she writes, “When I made a pilgrimage to Rye a couple of summers ago, it was with the objective of standing on the spot where Henry James dictated The Ambassadors.” In the essay I completed as part of my M.F.A. thesis, I wrote about the experience of staying in the house of a writer who had died there, and I wrote about Clampitt’s poems that deal with death. I don’t think I quite found a successful way to link them. But though it puts me in danger of romanticizing Clampitt and the place she once lived, I can’t help but feel that her expansive poems about loss are connected to the cozy grey clapboard house in Lenox. According to Trubek, “writers’ houses are by definition melancholy.” There is something melancholy about the Clampitt House. As Clampitt observes about Dickinson’s house, the poet’s “ambiguities” are inevitably given over to strangers’ imaginings of what she must have been like. It’s a good kind of melancholy, though, the kind that allows us to miss people we’ve never met. During a talk she gave at Grinnell forty-five years after she had graduated from the small Iowa college, Clampitt addressed the question of what a writer needs to know. “In one word, I’d say, predecessors. I don’t know why it is that things become more precious with the awareness that someone else has looked at them, thought about them, written about them. But so I find it to be . . . .Writers need company. We all need it.” Image: Clampitt House, courtesy the author
In Person On Poetry
| 1 book mentioned 2 8 min read
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11 comments:

  1. This is terrific, and I heartily agree. As for the word "project" as it applies to poetry, might it be an unfortunate byproduct of academia, where it is expected that one is always working toward some specific goal, i.e. a dissertation, a scholarly paper, a lecture, etc. Just another example of our culture's over-identification with masculine ethos. What you're describing – intuiting a poem – brings in the feminine (for both men AND women), the unnameable, mysterious forces within that work together with the conscious self to write the poem into being.

    Having a "project" isn't bad, necessarily, but it isn't how poems happen.

    I, too, chafe at the word "community" and find that it really does not apply to the world of poetry and poets, in the way that you've defined it. "Special-interest group" might be more accurate.

    Thanks for this – it's made my day.

    Mari L'Esperance

  2. Hey Dottie, this is a wonderfully lucid articulation of thinking about poetry, cooked the intuitive way. It makes me long to hear more of your thoughts on the nature of creativity and its mysteries. I know I can find out more by reading your poems, but I also like what you've written here. It has your verve. I think it's great that you speak so energetically about what you're doing, and it's wonderful that you accurately use terms from Husserl's phenomenology in making your vibrant case. Why shouldn't poets attempt to define their own work, or, if they don't want to, explain why not they're keeping mum? There's no obligation to spill the beans, of course, but why not? I totally agree with everything you're saying. But what about when somebody sincerely asks a poet, "What kind of poetry do you write?" Well, when that happens, it annoys me when poets answer: it's just poetry, it is what it is, you either get it or you don't. Talking around and about poetry doesn't hurt poetry. Quite the contrary. Thanks for doing it so well!

  3. intersting post, dottie. i myself am sort of intrigued by the idea that we poets may well be no different than bankers, lawyers, scientists, painters, musicians, and that, for once, we AREN'T special.

    in some sort of counter-intuitive leap in my mind, i feel like this could help poetry. like, if we acted a little less special maybe people at large would take more of an interest. maybe they wouldn't be so imtimidated. because, in reality,, the majority of people don't see themselves as specil, i don't think.

    anyway, just my two cents.

    best,
    j

  4. I always thought of a "project" as an obligation, or series of tasks, which are quite determined. This is much different from the creative act, which ideally (for me) is something that begins on a lark and bends up and turns and goes on until you are bored…then you do something else!

  7. Amen. I think if you're actually a poet, you should be living it, not working on projects. Audiences outside the poetry world (of which there are none, unless you bring free copies of your book to everyone you work with, and then there are twenty) don't relate to projects, they relate to life. Plus, poetry is about *poetry* and not projects.

  8. I suspect this is academia gone wrong, again. A poet's project sounds decent when you write a dissertation on themes running through a poet's body of work, but not as a description of it. You do it after the fact. It makes me imagine a corck-board with a post-it attached, denoting the project. 'Now, how to incorporate it into this poem?'

    Like those half-witted creative writing classes, where they teach you to always write a disposition, and begin with a theme. Then you must find out what message you want to give your readers. Choose a point of view, a setting and protagonist.

  9. I am so glad that people agree with me here. I feel some need to clarify even further, especially in light of a couple of the comments and responses I have seen both on and offline. Thanks so much for reading and commenting, by the way!

    When I set out to critique the term project used in the context of poetry, I was less concerned with policing a particular word than demoting the linear thinking the word connotes and promoting the transformative thinking a new discourse might encourage.
    My problem is less with the word project or community than with the linear way we, poets, have of describing our field.

    I do think poets are special, but more so I think all artists are special. Or more so even, I think the thinking of artists is special for its nonlinearity. I truly believe that if this kind of metaphorical (versus linear) thinking––that artists either naturally do or have been taught to do through a variety of factors––was promoted more in all people we would have a new and better world. The first step, I think, is poets taking enough pride in their work to not borrow terms to describe it. But instead to take this time in history to describe our process better, so as to inspire young poets everywhere. And yes, this notion being unearthed is a call to arms.

    What does this have to do with the term project? We poets should take some ownership to use words that we can truly stand behind. If we decide that a term that works for us is project, then so be it. But there needs to be less of a disconnect between how the world sees our field, how we talk about our field, and what our field truly thinks. I, for one, think a lot of the language of our field is outdated and/or ordained in some fashion that is not representative of many of our important processes and ideas. The way we create, for instance, is not understood well and many of us still revert to thinking of inspiration as a spiritual versus cognitive process. (And whatever your religious beliefs, this is just lazy thinking on all ends.) We have a lot of words that are distinctly our own (take “stanza” for instance, or the word “poem” for another). Why not make a whole contemporary discourse that is all our own?

    I understand that poets are humans like members of every other profession. We need to eat, time to sleep, and the chance to have a meaningful life. We are also people who, on some level, deal purely as novel language creators. That is our real role in a society, however much the world these days seems to malign or not respect our efforts. That is a big charge and we must respect ourselves if we expect the rest of the society to respect us. I, for one, am beyond sick of feeling the quiet shame that goes with telling people I am a poet. Being a poet means I am a novel language creator. It does not (necessarily) mean I am an academic, a liberal, a snappy dresser, a socially awkward person, an intellectual snob, a really cool person, an alcoholic, an untrustworthy person, a smoker, a free spirit, etc. (Or it could and that’s ok, but it doesn’t necessarily mean all that.) It means simply that I am an expert in creating new forms of language and I should be judged and respected as such by those who value language and the world new language creates. Because language is what makes the world. Because all action is born out of an idea, however embodied that idea may be.

    Being a poet can mean a whole host of infinite things other than being a novel language creator, true. But nowhere in the idea of being a poet does it mean I am (you are) conducting a project when I (we) write poems. Conceding to a linear tag is a seemingly small concession down a long road of being frightfully misunderstood.

    Thanks again for reading my post and for reading this comment!

  11. Yes! I work in IT by day and writes poems, well at other times. IT projects pretty much kill creativity in IT so why bring that language into the arts?

    The act of writing a new poem, for me anyway, is the act of destroying any kind of project that might be happening, even if just a little bit. Every poem is figuring out what a poem is, or more often than not, what it’s not.

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