Posts from October 2012

October 10, 2012

The Double Life For Poets

Published on Best American Poetry Blog

Is there reason to be especially concerned should, for economic or other reasons, the number of available teaching jobs in creative writing be increasingly inadequate to accommodate new MFA graduates with a concentration in poetry? Let me suggest this outcome will not be an entirely dire circumstance for the future state of poetry or for the poetic future of those most affected, when we take a retrospective look at the output and careers of poets who have lived the double life – that is, those who wrote verse at the same time they held down non-poetry occupations. The double life has served many poets quite well.

Emily Dickinson helped maintain the Dickinson household in Amherst and did the baking for the family. Walt Whitman wrote copy and editorial commentary for newspapers; he and C. P. Cavafy worked as government employees. There was William Carlos Williams, who practiced medicine, and, for eight years, T. S. Eliot chose to be a banker. Marianne Moore and Edna St. Vincent Millay were employed in various, unrelated positions while still writing. Pablo Neruda, a diplomat and politician; Robert Frost and Wendell Berry, farmers.

I’m judging that young poets do not need to get hung up on teaching as the narrow means open to them for a successful poetry career. Indeed, Wallace Stevens felt strongly the lessons he learned in business – he ran the surety claims department for the Hartford Insurance Company – improved his verse. When offered a poetry chair at Harvard, he turned it down in favor of the double life.

Is the Wallace Stevens precedent counterintuitive? I think not, and not because he didn’t care deeply about the part of his life that dealt with poetry. No, there is a more subtle reason. Most serious poets write poems for those surprises through which verse should always lead. Why would it therefore be confusing that someone who constantly traveled someplace unusual through the venue of his verse could also behold the other side of his double life being both surprising and inviting as well? After all, we do not merely leave who we are on the page; rather, we bring who we are to the page.

It’s often not a freedom of choice to adopt a double life, for many poets must accept that path before a career break or an accumulation of breaks occurs. Today, there are known poets who have, along the way, been an accountant, a biologist, an administrator, a musician; in fact, there are still others, including this author, who permanently choose a double life.

If this course seems necessary or opportune, I offer a few guidelines. First, let your poetic side help you select a non-poetic job. You can’t go home at night with verse on the agenda and be befuddled or burdened by an unhealthy and severe day at work. Second, pick a job that will not wear you out physically. Have energy remaining to respond affirmatively to the siren call of your verse. Third, make sure your daily job is not jejune or vapid, for that will surely convey itself into your writing. Finally, give yourself moments of recovery during each work day to jot down a thought or two or three related to your verse – for, believe me, the thoughts will come.

Once developed with flexibility, practicality, and a little elan vital, the double life can become a durable answer to the many questions hovering around a commitment to the writing of verse.

Published on Best American Poetry Blog

October 9, 2012

Writing Verse About 9/11

Published on Best American Poetry Blog

On the afternoon of September 10th, 2011, seven poets participated in a reading, held for the 10th commemoration of 9/11 and sponsored by Poets House, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Trinity Wall Street. The reading, convened in the cavernous sanctuary of Trinity Church at Wall and Broadway, two blocks south of Ground Zero, attracted approximately 300 persons. Poems of grief, remembrance and reconciliation were presented by the poets.

During their readings that day, both Cornelius Eady and Mark Doty referred to difficulties they each had faced in writing about the 9/11 experience. I believe the obstacles they confronted in writing about the event spoke for many poets, who had dealt with similar demons in the aftermath of 9/11.

The impediments are patent. Instinctively, we know words cannot and do not supplant reality; words, even if crafted well, can only make damnable reality more understandable. Subtlety is, as a matter of course, the mother’s milk of a poet’s craft; and those immediate and uncorrectable 9/11 experiences of inescapability, unconditioned desperation, palpable incomprehension, and uncompromising exposure, whether one were actually present that day in downtown New York City or not, simply countervail and explode a poet’s natural field of responsive behavior. The veins and nerves are torn. One cannot be subtle in the face of impossible violence and destruction, which immediately rip away at words attempting to make meaning out of meaninglessness. The events were too much with and part of us – words could not compete with the visions and imaginings we all had of both Ground Zero and those whose partial remains created the indescribable personality of the Pit, the Pile.

The most notable verse to surface on the subject of 9/11 came from the marvelous poet, Galway Kinnell, whose poem, “When The Towers Fell,” was published in September, 2002 by THE NEW YORKER. The verse put the events elegantly, evocatively and soberly in a context of something larger than the moment and its specific characteristics; rather, the poem put 9/11 seriatim in a long line of indiscriminate horror and violence that have too often proven to be humanity’s bedfellows over millennia. We seven poets ended the program with a reciting of the poem – each of us taking a part of “When The Towers Fell.” Reading this work alone or together with other poets, I could not help but recall Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar” and Whitman’s Civil War poetry.

My own poetic attempts fell principally to a piece, albeit an important piece, of the 9/11 story. St. Paul’s Chapel, located within yards of the North Tower site, served as the 24/7 relief center – a respite of peace and refuge – for the recovery workers, who toiled in the savage Pit during the nine-month, clean-up phase. I volunteered part-time there, sometimes during a day, but mostly overnight on a weekend. This experience translated into a poem I wrote, “St. Paul’s Chapel,” which has been, for the last ten years, the memento card for the approximately 30,000 visitors who come weekly to the Chapel. Though a mere few yards away from the unspeakable, there was in the Chapel at least air to breathe, a place to think, and enough people to hug – not an unfair amount of essence for verse.

Published on Best American Poetry Blog

October 8, 2012

Auden on Prayer Book Revision: No More Mr. Nice Guy?

– Published on Best American Poetry Blog

When the article, "On Working with W. H. Auden on The Psalms," appeared here, I received a number of questions and requests for more information. So, I’m taking this opportunity to respond – at least, in part.

I’ve noticed it came as a complete surprise to many persons that W. H. Auden was so fully engaged, intellectually and emotionally, in the Episcopal Church’s revision of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, begun in earnest in the late 1960s. While a portion of his views on the subject was included in the article, associated material by and about Auden on the revision project is also contained in the final pages of Later Auden, the most recent biography by Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and principal biographer. To receive a little more flavor of the intensity of Auden’s perspective toward the subject, add the following excerpt from one of his letters:

"What has happened over the last few years has made me realize that those who rioted when Cranmer introduced a vernacular liturgy were right. When this reform nonsense started, what we should have done is the exact opposite of the Roman Catholics: we should have said 'Henceforth, we will have the Book of Common Prayer in Latin.' (There happens to be an excellent translation.)"

These views were further clarified and emphasized in the considerable communication that exists on various aspects of the revision process between Auden and Canon Charles Guilbert, who was, at the time, the Custodian of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER of the Episcopal Church. The basis for Auden’s fundamental aversion to the revision can be summed up, I believe, in this thoughtful and quite eloquent excerpt from a letter, dated March 19th, 1968, to Guilbert:

"We had the Providential good-fortune, a blessing denied to the Roman Catholics, that our Prayer Book was compiled at the ideal historical moment, that is to say, when the English Language was already in all essentials the language we use now – nobody has any difficulty understanding Shakespeare’s or Cranmer’s English, as they have difficulty with Beowulf or Chaucer – at the same time, men in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries still possessed what our own has almost totally lost, a sense for the ceremonial and ritual both in life and in language."

Published on Best American Poetry Blog