Maria Terrone
Finishing Line Press ($12)

by George Guida

The evil of banality lurks “like ax murderers” in a recycled cardboard takeout cup, in “Muzak . . . stuck on hiss,” on a spouse’s computer as “his eyes read the monitor / like a love letter,” and in a series of phone messages “lying in wait / on your bedside phone.” Maria Terrone wrestles this insidious spirit into the light in her new chapbook,American Gothic, Take 2.

In an American life long on contact but short on connection, words mangle and are “mangled,” an adjective that the speaker of the opening ars poetica, “Scraps,” applies to a poem draft discarded in a takeout cup. The cup that has claimed the speaker’s words is itself a mundane objet d’art, “an Acropolis cup of Aegean blue,” about which this now short-order artist concludes, “I offer America my own moveable feast.” As other personae do here, she manages to redeem violent or violated language through the whimsical humor that also animates Terrone’s earlier collections—The Bodies We Were Loaned(Word Works, 2002) and A Secret Room in Fall (Ashland Poetry Press, 2006). Whereas the humor of those earlier books blunts the force of concussive loss, here it soothes the inflammation of inconsequence.

In the manner of Mark Strand, Terrone extends metaphors to explore the labyrinths of existential angst. She does this to best effect in the rangy “The Beatles Throw a Party in an Ancient Temple.” This prosy poem’s controlling metaphor is a dream; most of its lengthy lines describe the Fab Four’s unconscious “soiree,” as a means of transcending a fearsome epiphany:

When I walk down the street or descend into the
subway, I am not thinking of antiquities and the
tragedy of their destruction but how I can be saved
from destruction—by terrorists, or time itself. It is not
dying. I am no longer young.

The scene leaves the speaker and us with an image of impersonal comfort,

. . . surrounded by the idols of my youth, all of
them youths, too, all still alive, bobbing their
heads up and down as they hobnobbed with their
guests. It is not dying.

So any attempt to transcend our fragility is as much an italicized wish as the neat unpacking of a dream.

Although Terrone has in the past exhibited a formalist touch as deft as Elizabeth Bishop’s and a knack for arresting turns as keen as Margaret Atwood’s, in many of these two dozen poems she prefers unassuming structures (“A Star Looks Down on the Oscars”) and straighter lines of thought (“At Land’s Edge”), which balance a variety of generally deliberate figures. A stanza from “Means of Travel” typifies the volume’s modest approach to form and theme:

Now I’m back, wingless, finless,
wondering how to live.
Better to stumble to the edge
of each day and teeter there,
or pound stakes into the earth,
camping far back in camouflage?

The question implies an imperative that concerns us all, and that finds an artist in Maria Terrone entirely conscious of its importance: how to will into being “a string that you follow” through the everyday.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

René Char
translated by Gustaf Sobin
Counterpath Press ($15.95)

by Martin Balgach

It is well known that the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wrote at length about the poet’s ability to reveal the human condition, was an admirer and friend of René Char. Char’s writing is gracefully tethered to a poetically present metaphysics—and such philosophical instincts are clearly evident in The Brittle Age and Returning Upland.

These two books, written in the mid-1960s and now offered as a bilingual collection, were translated from the French by the late Gustaf Sobin, who was, early in his own writing career, mentored by Char. In his introduction, while relaying his personal connection to Char, Sobin also offers a precise context for these poems: “René Char taught me, first, to read particulars: that the meticulously observed detail, drawn from nature, could provide the key to the deepest reaches of the imaginary.”

The aphoristic, often single-sentence poems that compose The Brittle Age require the type of reading patience summoned by a haiku or koan. However, Char’s visceral and relentlessly metaphysical verse offers a grittier, less harmonious account of existence; in the tradition of classically French existentialism, Char manages to distill minute facets of absurdity through lines like “I’ve had, since birth, an aggressive breathing.”

Char meditatively engages the struggles of existence, and his exquisitely harnessed angst ultimately finds solace in death, with sobering utterances such as:

Be consoled. In dying you return everything
that you were lent, your love, your friends. Even that
living coldness, harvested over and over.

With each page devoted to an unusually short passage such as “To suffer from the ache of intuition” and “To abolish distance kills. The gods only die by being among us,” The Brittle Age requires a lucidly steadfast patience, because the mind intuitively seems to cadence brevity. But in its minimalism, Char’s words resonate much like negative space, and the blankness of the surrounding page is eerily present. This contrast offers the self-controlled reader an opportunity to savor Char’s highly attuned poetic—a poetic that with stringent economy and conviction, turns words into precious conveyors of human perception. Such an evocative testimony beckons our return to both the dog-eared passages and the collection’s impact as a whole.

Slightly more varied in length and impact than The Brittle Age’s stark gravity, Returning Upland is still ethereally shrouded in the poet’s restless consciousness. However, amidst perceptions of chaos and absurdity, Char’s writing remains clearly orchestrated; emotive realizations and philosophical theories are connected to political and cultural references of French towns and regions with a meta-present observational suffrage, as if with each breathing perception, an undeniable weight pushes. And with the help of the book’s glossary, poems such as “Seven Fragments of Luberon” embody both symbolically and at times literally, the significance of eroded landmarks in a perpetually disparate human landscape.

Many of the longer prose poems, such as “Slowness of the Future,” further extrapolate ideas put forth inThe Brittle Age, but the impact here is juxtaposed with narrative threads, ultimately offering more lyric depth to the philosophical impulses, as seen in the later half of the poem:

Death in life is repugnant, nonalloyable; death,
however, within death is something accessible, is
nothing: a frightened belly could crawl there without
trembling.

I have overthrown the last wall, the one that
encircles the snow nomads, and I see—o my very
first parents—the candelabra’s summer.

Our figure on earth is only the second third of
a continuous pursuit, a point, upland.

Overtly solemn, many of these poems slyly circumnavigate the ordinary while devastating and invigorating the reader’s consciousness with a viciously individualistic humanism, as seen in “Precursor”:

In a rock I recognized death, fugued and
measurable, the open bed of its little accomplices
beneath the shelter of a fig tree. Not a sign of a
carver; at the base of night’s stairway each morning
of earth opened it wings.
Without repeating, freed of the fear of men, I
dig in the air my tomb and my return.

Although Char’s perceptions are rooted in an undeniable individualism, they inform universal human struggles as they work towards an oddly liberating but always stuttering grasp of mortality and existence. Perhaps Heidegger, who feared that language’s true meaning was being eroded, saw in Char a poet who transcended language, as these poems hold us accountable for our very consciousness, regardless of their translated diction, length, or form.

As with any of Char’s writing, the reader of this collection will find no shortage of sophisticated cognitive and linguistic tonalities steeped in an existential worldview, and these philosophical underpinnings only enhance the poetic impressions. René Char’s lens on reality is simply fascinating and unique, and these translations of The Brittle Age and Returning Upland are a vital addition to his English language body of work.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

CENTURY OF CLOUDS
Bruce Boone
Nightboat Books ($14.95)

FACE
Melissa Buzzeo
Book Thug ($18)

by Tyrone Williams

With three small books—My Walk with Bob, The Truth About Ted, and Century of Clouds—Bruce Boone established himself as a pioneer of a gay-inflected New Narrative in the 1970s and early 1980s. That Boone, New Narrative, and gay politics were all situated in San Francisco is not without consequence, for all three found themselves in dialogue with the Marxist-inflected Language Writing movement, more than half of whose members were also in the Bay Area at the time. One element common to both New Narrative and Language Writing is their struggle with the question of a radical politics emerging from (and, problematically, tethered to) a self-conscious community of activists and writers. But while early Language Writing underscored the unpredictable irruptions through the multilayered surfaces of the syntactical and social, New Narrative preserved the human body from this thoroughgoing criticism and, more controversially, revitalized storytelling as a strategic affirmation of marginalized communities. Cut to the “present”: a young New Yorker, Melissa Buzzeo, has been confronting similar issues regarding the human and political body, though scaled down to the problem of representation. In her two full-length books, What Began Us and Face, the San Francisco problematic of radical politics and communities is microscopically examined as a problem of the between, the impasse, the aporia. But while Boone zooms in and out from the micro- to the macro-scopic, pausing a few times to consider what lies between them, Buzzeo poses the one against larger forces arrayed against it, focusing primarily on the groundless middle.

The republication of Century of Clouds, edited by Rob Halpern, raises at least two questions: why this book, and why now? In his preface, Halpern argues that despite the book’s “outdated” politics, it remains not only a political and social model for “us” but also enacts the very forms it projects; it performs the kinds of social and political models “we” envision. These figures of the collective—“we,” “us”—can be presupposed according to what Dana Ward has called, in relation to Boone’s work, “the radicality of friendship,” a position implicitly taken up in Halpern’s preface. For Halpern, the book “returns now like a lost contemporary, speaking as a friend among friends.” The allusion to, and apparent emendation of, the Wordsworthean ethos—the poet as a man speaking to other men—demands that Halpern insist on the contemporaneity of the book as a model of friendship among political radicals—e.g., the Marxist study group Boone attended in 1977 and 1978—and, most important, a model of radical friendship that serves as the foundation or nexus for an emerging political praxis.

Although the book remains true to the New Narrative rejection of imposed form—its narration is propelled by desire, memory, regret, wonder and so on—it has a coherent and perceptible structure. The two middle “sections” concern communities: one religious, one political. Relatively early in his life, Boone joined a religious order. He faithfully records his sense of both the fraternity and frustration a few of the novitiates felt in relation to the church and its authorities. After leaving the church, Boone participated in a Marxist study group led by, among others, Frederic Jameson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Terry Eagleton. During one of the seminars, Boone famously showcased his pink sticker, publicizing his sexual orientation in order to raise the question of the relationship between gay liberation and Marxist teleology. Boone makes no pretense that his desire to join these communities was not first and foremost driven by the desire for fraternity and friendship. Indeed, in the afterword to this edition of the book, he is blunt about the matter. Yes, he wrote this memoir as a way to change the world—and Halpern emphasizes its performative orientation—but, nonetheless, he concedes that “Ideology . . . has been a pretext for discovering friends.” Later, to emphasize the point, he writes, “In the end, it’s emotion that counts. Just emotion.”

Framing the two narratives on communities are, perhaps, the most telling sections of Century of Clouds. The book opens with the problem of funerals from a radical, secular perspective and concludes with a dance party the last night of the Marxist seminar. The funeral is itself prefaced by an “overture” (Boone’s dream of flight, of “largeness,” of escape), while the party is tagged with a “coda” (another dream: Boone in a meadow of waist-high flowers, running toward those who are calling him forward). The corniness of these “dreams” has a political point, one with Boone’s “elevation” of gossip as an important ritual within communities. Both serve to reinforce communal ties by valorizing the ordinary, the everyday, even the cliché, but of course it is precisely the ordinary, the everyday, and the cliché that, from a Marxist perspective, hinder the arrival of the future. Boone understands this contradiction all too well, facing up to another facet of the quotidian: friendship.

At a crucial point in this narrative Boone raises the question of the enemy, for he understands that there is no friend without a foe, that the neighbor cannot exist without the stranger, and so forth. Or as Boone puts it, in a much more radical form: “Who is the enemy and who isn’t?” Without that second independent clause—“who isn’t?”—Boone’s formulation would remain one with the most conventional, positivistic modes of thought along the entire political spectrum. Even if Boone “only” means identifying the enemy is sometimes a difficult enterprise, but one susceptible to the protocols of interpretation and analysis, the consequences are the same as those that would follow from what I believe he really means: every friend is an enemy. Those consequences: the difference between friend and foe is a matter of time and space, of date and location, since every friend, if he or she is “human,” must fail, must lapse. On this view the “radicality of friendship” that serves as the matrix for an emerging world would amount to the totality of friendship, a totalitarianism of friends, the end, at last, of enmity—and the closure of Homo sapiens, if not the conceit called “humans.”

The context for Boone’s formulation of the friend-qua-foe is a conflict during a volleyball game after one of the seminar lectures. Certain of Boone’s “pushy teammates” began taking over the game, essentially trying to turn it into a singles or doubles tennis match. Because this had happened at least once before, Boone had already planned a response—and, just as important, had gotten the backing of some of the women attending the conference. When the ball is shot at Boone, he catches it and marches to the sidelines, halting the game. One of the women, Sonia, is satisfied by an apology from one of the “pushy” teammates, but Boone isn’t so sure he’s willing to forgive and forget. Sonia admonishes him, asking Boone, rhetorically, “But he isn’t the enemy, is he?” Boone agrees that, “probably the enemy was Standard Oil, Exxon, imperialism, etc. etc.,” but concedes that he does so “with some reluctance.” As he did earlier during his “first intervention” when he announced that he was a gay man, Boone aligns himself with some women against some men at the conference. The friend, the enemy, could be, at any moment, a woman, a man, if only for a moment. In short, sexual orientation, like gender, is as much a conundrum as friendship, as fraternity: who is straight and who isn’t? Who is a man or woman and who isn’t? How can “we” be certain at any given time?

Only, apparently, in the fullness of time. This allusion to the spiritual Marxism of Walter Benjamin, whose “The Storyteller” is one of the ur-texts of New Narrative,” is deliberate, for if every friend is not, at the same time (that is, eternally), an enemy, then how is it, for example, that Century of Cloudslanguished for so long out of print? The quick answer is simple: Boone’s friends, to say nothing of Boone himself, were not responsible for keeping it in print. But then, one must ask, what were they responsible for? Who was responsible and who wasn’t? And if, as Boone says in the afterword, this book’s politics will too “pass,” that its register of a moment in the history of a gay Marxist with other gays, other Marxists, and other gay Marxists must make way for a future politics, then is it an act of political irresponsibility to resurrect it, to bring it back to life, to burden the present with the past?

If we refuse the very form and rhetoric of these questions, if we insist on the relevance of a book for us in the present, this is because we accept, implicitly, our friend’s failings, and how they inevitably veer toward the enemy camp. Halpern reminds us that Century of Clouds was published just before the onset of AIDS as a public health crisis that was linked, in the public imagination, to both a gendered sexuality (gay, not lesbian) and sexual lifestyle (the baths, not the discos). Given the book’s deliberate teleology—from death and mourning to life and gaiety— we may “now” read, perhaps can only read, Century of Clouds as “A picture of a book in reverse.” Melissa Buzzeo’s Face, from which I just quoted, performs its own act of retrospection as mourning even if, per Century of Clouds, it too wants to change the world. It too is an act, an event, but rather than being poised at the border between politics and friendship, ethos and eros, it is implicitly agnostic about the possibility of bridging the gap between experience and description. While Boone worries that politics and friendship are susceptible to hermeneutics, Buzzeo has little faith in interpretive strategies. Her method and ethos are postlapsarian attentiveness, chastened phenomenology: “The act of following is not like the act of being faithful. It is not forlorn. It is also not required. Nor relinquished.” To be fair, Boone’s worries do amount to doubt within the two communities but, as noted above, doubt gives way to ecstatic friendship, punctuated by cloying dreams. For Buzzeo there is no joy in others, or at least not the others arrayed against one. Hers is a writing layered in the folds of its own isolation even as it gestures toward others, toward a “girl who walks into the present,” as if to suggest that fraternity and friendship whisper to one another even when they have been separated. That is, the interdependence (one may as well say co-dependence) of sorority and fraternity is not only formally analogous to that of friendship and enmity but may also be inextricable from both: all four would interpenetrate and constitute one another.

Thus there are no “men” or “women” or “boys”—only “a girl”—in the poems Face comprises Face, as though Buzzeo would like us to do the impossible: imagine the first face in human history. Faces, these poems suggest, are all we have; anthropomorphism, like appropriation, is precisely what allows us to see, to respond, to remain “speechless” no longer. It is not necessary to affirm this point by listing all the colloquial expressions in English—to face the facts, to face the music, “Facing It” (as Kommunyaka writes), to put a face on it, etc.—but they do illuminate the general problem of alterity. Moreover, these colloquialisms have one thing in common: the presupposition of trauma, trouble, difficulty, crisis.¹ Here, trauma underscores the movement from “lake” to “city” to “star.” The “evidence” for trauma is precisely Buzzeo’s repetitious phrases, the endless going over the same, a strategy or compulsion which marks both of her books. InWhat Began Us, as here, “a girl” enters the text shortly after it begins. And, bodies of water—a puddle, a lake, a river, an ocean, and, not least of all, humans—populate both books.

Not surprisingly, then, Face begins before itself; the postscript to What Began Us serves as a preface toFace. Buzzeo cites a passage from Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference. I note only the first and last sentences: “Spelled out in images and photographs, a face loses the mobility of its expressions, the perpetual unfolding and becoming of the living being . . . If he [the lover] thinks he leaves her like a dead body, could it be that the lover discovers in her what is terrible about the limits of nudity, or dredges up what he needs to move on to some place beyond the realm of the living?” The trajectory described by Irigaray replicates that of Face, which begins as a kind of ecopoetics: “The lake that lies between. / Is imperfect because it lacks meaning.” The cleaved sentence can only “mean” once it finds its prosthesis—the human: “I put my hand in the water to attach meaning.” The distance required to delude oneself that the lake is immobile is absolute with respect to the face of the other. Or to put it another way: there is no ethos without this ungovernable alterity which will not be gainsaid but must, nonetheless, be said if one is to gain—or regain—anything.

Thus, for Buzzeo, an ecopoetics gambit opens up the problem of the “girl” who walks into “the present,” an “ocean” that is finite but, to sight, apparently infinite. The movement between sensation, perception and reason is thus only complicated by memory. Would that it were not so: “If there could be discovery. The discovery of now in the present.” Trauma, an indelible memory, functions like a palimpsest or mask, one face over another, a memory all too present, eclipsing the face of now: “The discovery of face beyond the puddle as you lifted. Listened.” Of course, that last word—“Listened”—takes Buzzeo beyond mere reportage (“There are reports that they are dead”), for Buzzeo can know that the lifted head is listening only by projecting her face—or the faces of other victims—onto “that” face. Buzzeo moves back and forth between ethos and oblivion: to name and unname, to sketch and blur, to be responsible and irresponsible. Here, as in Boone, the gesture toward irresponsibility, however negated by the countervailing gesture toward responsibility, hesitates between the absolution of faith in an indeterminate future—one where division gives way to unity, to “healing”—and praxis in a present, as secular as a hand attaching itself to handle (and be handled), and thus grapple with, power and “justice.” ²

By the time we get to the second half of Face, Buzzeo turns explicitly to the performance of her writing, what it is doing and not doing in relationship to justice and forgiveness, retrieval and letting go, ethos and oblivion. Though she acknowledges that “the acquisition of speech” is a building up, an “In wall” which dissimulates as the façade of a “door” (“She wonders wall or door”), Buzzeo takes the risk, is writing risk: “To step over the echo of moat she is asked to give up Mouth.” Beyond—that is, within—the moat is the castle, here figured as the city of reports: “In the city there are soggy papers and late papers, seeded papers, early papers. Sentenced papers. Papers that separated themselves. . . . They were not part of belong. Not part of born.” In short, one never quite arrives, weighed down by baggage, one’s speech, skin, body parts (or absence thereof), birthplace, etc.

The last section of the book, “We Look At Star” is a sustained refusal of the consolation of origins, of a homeland. The futility of inscribing a canny tradition—“We are so empty pointing”—is marked as a turning away from the face, from the human, and from the earth. Here, ethos takes on its anthropological/sociological meanings: the customs and traditions of a people. No need to mention the distance between peoples, one equivalent to that between humans and what lies beyond or behind a sky. Buzzeo turns away from the sky toward space, what separates faces: “Because we cannot continue. As such, I write you in space.” Because we live our lives among spaces, among temporalities, we can always, if we choose, face one another: “Because I would ask that in facing we forgive.” The unilateral movement of the gift, the open hand reaching out to the closed fist, is not projected into some unpredictable future. For Buzzeo this present is now, at hand: “Towards a place that has barely been. But that is, already.”

 

¹ In that sense, Boone’s short chapbook, The Truth About Ted, is exemplary inasmuch as it rehearses the gossip that was unleashed to hunt down the truth, to put a gay (or not) face on an alien in the guise of a friend and vice versa.

² Another classic example of this difference is the debate over the relevance of affirmative action and the insistence that the post-racial future has arrived and renders such programs obsolete if not anachronistic.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

edited by John Lee Clark
Gallaudet University Press ($35)

by John Jacob

In Deaf American Poetry, John Lee Clark has assembled a fascinating mix of poets who share little in common beyond the fact that they are deaf. Included is Clark's well-written introduction, which was first published in Poetry, and an Editor's Note that describes his unique project: "this book is not an anthology by just anyone who has a hearing loss; rather, it is drawn from the work of culturally Deaf people who belong to the signing community.” This distinction is important, since it means that even the earliest poets featured here have had the ability to communicate with others who know the signs and symbols of ASL.

The introduction notes that "Deaf poets are often objects of amazement or dismissal, their work rarely judged for its merits beyond the content of their deafness"; indeed, few of the poets included in this anthology have strong publication credits until we encounter poets born after 1950, many of whom have degrees from teaching programs or creative writing workshops. Clark also quotes John Keats and his reference to unheard melodies, which are "sweeter," and concludes with the idea that "the little publicity that Deaf poets received continued to be more about the idea of the Deaf poet than the poetry at hand.”

Significantly, more than half of the thirty-seven contributors are women, and also included are African American poets who utilize elements of Ebonics to express themselves. The anthology begins with John R. Burnet, whose poem "Emma" (1920) is well known in the deaf community. It reads as a sort ofHiawatha to the deaf population, utilizing rhyming couplets and blank verse, as do most of the early poems in the volume. These poems do not deviate significantly from other American poetry except that their subjects most often are deaf people or others who would understand the deaf experience.

George M. Teegarden, who lived from 1852-1936, is the first poet represented to have graduated from Gallaudet University, the deaf-friendly school that funded the publication of the book. While Teegarden’s poetry is not exceptional, his contemporary J. Schuyler Long contributes the first poem that explores what tinnitus feels like, trying to involve readers not of the deaf community. “And I wish that I could tell them / Of the most delightful things / That I hear and see in silence.”

Some of the poets are also mute or semi-mute, as is Agatha Hanson, who discusses in her inclusion the “weaker tide of sound” that deaf poets experience. Howard L. Terry proposes that deaf people have heightened senses of touch and especially sight because of their deafness—an interesting position that many who are blind would agree with. His short poem “On My Deafness” concludes: “truth is in silence found.” Alice Jane McVan discusses the oppression that deaf people have experienced, and she is the first poet included to have made much use of free verse.

Felix Kowalewski is one of the few poets who treat negativity in their work, and Clark speculates that “his fixation on deafness as the cause of his sorrow and despair may have masked the true cause of his depression.” Regardless, his poetry is included because of his poem “Heart of Silence,” a word painting in which the narrator identifies himself with Victor Hugo's Quasimodo. The poem is beautiful: “A scurrying cloud / Obscures the sun for a moment—the edges are silver. / It passes on and the radiant orb / Bursts forth once more in an exultant splendor / Of sheer white light.”

Loy E. Golladay is one of several poets to write free verse about humorous or light subjects, and he is known as the first poet to be associated with the Deaf Pride movement. Robert F. Panara’s poetry takes up the cause, as in “On His Deafness,” which ends: “The raindrop’s pitter-patter on the eaves, / The lover’s sigh, the thrumming of guitar, / And, if I choose, the rustle of a star!” The Deaf Pride movement reached its peak in 1988 when students at Gallaudet protested the university’s decision to hire a hearing woman as president, a decision that was later rescinded. Curtis Robbins explains it in his poem “The Rally That Stood the World Still,” an interesting mix of politics and pride.

Other poets deal with issues of consequence, such as the simple act of having gone to school with hearing folk as opposed to other deaf students—a major theme for Raymond Luczak, who writes of the anxiety of fingerspelling in poems such as “Hummingbirds”:

My fingers were only
hummingbirds in a small cage

I sat up and freed
my deaf voice, my hearing hands

They fluttered under my chin,
in front of my chest, everywhere

Kristi Merriweather, who was born in 1971, writes in Ebonics, and Pamela Wright-Meinhardt, also born that year, writes a long pun on Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

Finally, the editor is included with a poem that could easily stand among the best for its excellence of expression: “My understanding has some weight, / so my feet will soon glissade / down to earth, to rest again / close to my hands / cuddling small wonders." This poem, like many others in this unique collection, should demonstrate once and for all that “disabled” poets have a place in American literary culture.

 

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

K. Silem Mohammad
Roof Books ($13.95)

by Morgan Myers

With 2003’s Deer Head Nation, K. Silem Mohammad gave us the first published collection of Flarf; with The Front, he may be aiming to create the last. Not that the book makes any grand pronouncements or offers any epoch-shifting innovations—quite the opposite. Mohammad has recently promised a post-Flarf era, and with his Sonnagrams—scrambled Shakespeare sonnets that combine Flarf’s goofy aesthetic with Bökean anagrammatic techniques—he seems to be in the process of creating one.

Mohammad’s Sonnagrams have been turning up in his readings and in various published forms for a while—most recently in a chapbook of the first twenty from Slack Buddha Press—and the full-length collection that gathers them may signal Flarf’s graduation as strongly as Deer Head Nation signaled its coming out. But The Front isn’t that book. Instead, it’s more like senior beach week—this is Flarf on holiday, free from the Bush-era political landscape that injected so much dark satire into books like Deer Head Nation, and equally free from the overarching thematic and conceptual gestures that have characterized so many Flarf collections, from Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson to Nada Gordon’sFolly. The Front gives such last vestiges of poetic seriousness the finger, and then goes straight for the crude, absurdist laugh:

two methods for generating the Fibonacci Sequence
1) with her monkey
2) up your ass

Not surprisingly, the book suffers from occasional bouts of senioritis. After all, it was that justified political outrage that made Flarf’s air of condescending mockery feel righteous, and those overarching conceptual gestures that opened up fresh poetic territory. More than that, the best Flarf poems have always used their silliness as a kind of rope-a-dope to set up devastating emotional haymakers. While Mohammad doesn’t completely pass up powerfully poetic lines like “I hope I am never reborn and iridescent” or “I guess I feel like articulating / the poetics behind dead people / which live on our eyelashes,” there’s a curious kind of hollowness to the book’s affect.

So curious, in fact, that it’s tempting to take that hollowness itself as the book’s unifying theme. It is, after all, called The Front—which, as the title poem reminds us, can mean a facade as well as a battlefield. The space between sincerity and irony, sympathy and ventriloquism, poetry and slapstick, has always been the no-man’s-land that Flarfists have fought to claim. The Front may represent Mohammad’s effort to push that battle to its (il)logical conclusion, to confront us with a poetry that really is the assemblage of empty samplings that Flarf is so often dismissed as being, a pure front without the fractured ghost of lyric subjectivity lurking behind it.

More likely, though, the book is simply the work of a poet totally unafraid to be “merely” entertaining, a quick victory lap and last hurrah for an aesthetic that seems to have thoroughly won literary and institutional legitimacy. As a culmination of Flarf’s original project to dismantle all kinds of stodginess in poetry, this amounts to a powerful statement in spite of itself.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

by Andy Sturdevant

Bird watching, like any pastime that requires a lot of quiet, solitary, repetitive behavior, comes with a degree of built-in frustration. Even under ideal circumstances—fair weather, good visibility—there’s no guarantee that a day in the field will amount to much if your subjects aren’t cooperating, and they often don’t. Birds are finicky, elusive subjects of study; their behavior is inconsistent. It is with this in mind that we can enjoy the preface to Edmund Selous’s near-definitive 1901 guide to the subject, entitled simply Bird Watching. Selous, a British ornithologist who authored a dozen books on the subject, lays out a few ground rules in the book’s preface. “It is not my intention to make general statements in regard to the habits of any particular bird,” he warns nervously. He then further qualifies the narrow scope of his intentions, until his text teeters on the brink of incomprehensibility. See if you can work through this:

Moreover, it is obvious that in much of the more important business of bird-life, one would be fully justified in arguing from the particular to the general: perhaps (though this is not my opinion) one would always be. But, whether this is the case or not, I wish it to be understood that, throughout, a remark that any bird acts in such or such a way means, merely, that I have, on one or more occasions, seen it do so.

Birds. They’re not really cooperative. At the very least, they’re not in the business of doing their human spectators any favors.

Selous’s warnings are telling. He is claiming, essentially, that no single bird watching experience can perfectly capture the essence of the bird. Simply because one sees and records a bird engaging in any given action doesn’t mean that all birds of the type would do the same in a similar situation. “One may have only had the luck to see well a single point in the round of activities of any species,” he writes.

Consider where this leaves the visual artist, then. The task of capturing the essential qualities of any species of bird—“here is a photo of a typical summer tanager in its typical native habitat”—becomes impossible, because there is no such essence. Such a caption becomes a sort of lie, or at least a vast oversimplification. True, you may have a photo of a summer tanager perched upon a branch. But what are the circumstances surrounding the shot? At what point in the bird’s “round of activities” are we? Can we even know? Just because this particular tanager perches in such a way, do all tanagers? This is just the sort of situation, so subject to nuance and unknown variables, which prompts Selous’s anxious logorrhea.

Accept these bird watching travails as given, and a whole new, troubling line of inquiry opens up. If something as seemingly simple as a photo of a bird in the wild so easily becomes a misrepresentation, what other misrepresentations within visual culture might we be unaware of? For that matter, can any visual representation of a subject in the physical world be trusted? Here is the space where McCartney steps in: she solves the problem neatly by eliminating the birds altogether, with all of their inconveniently idiosyncratic nuances and behaviors. She replaces them in their natural habitats with perfectly stationary craft-store doppelgangers—the sorts of artificial Styrofoam-and-feathers birds that have adorned Christmas wreaths and floral displays for generations—carefully placed in sylvan settings and beautifully photographed.

Or, perhaps it’s something else. Earlier in her career, McCartney shot a series of photographs at the Bronx Zoo. The zoo, the natural history museum, and the other institutions built in the 19th and 20th centuries to educate Americans on the natural world have undergone some radical transformations in the past few decades. It’s rare these days to encounter a great hall full of taxidermied animals in self-contained dioramas. The photos that make up McCartney’s Bronx Zoo series, like those in Bird Watching, straddle nature and artifice, pointing out the common ground between the naturalist and the artist. The tableaux (primarily aviaries) that she depicts are carefully, meticulously presented to create the impression of untamed nature. Only in a few does she tip her hand, revealing the contrivance. In a photo entitled Hammerhead Stork, the titular bird perches on a branch in front of a white wall; above it, we see an artificial skylight and an I-beam, and below, wild undergrowth.

Ironically, if the experiences of generations of schoolchildren are to be trusted, those old-style dioramas—think of the famed squid and whale at the American Museum of Natural History—for all their artifice, created in the viewer a sense of the sublime, the same sort of awe that one often finds in encounters with nature. In a similar way, McCartney invokes that reverence for the natural world, on a smaller, more intimate scale. She plays both naturalist and artist, enacting both roles with such enthusiasm that the lines between them are almost completely blurred.

About the Artist: Paula McCartney creates photographs and artists books that explore the idea of constructed landscapes, using the scientific practice of collecting, labeling, and organizing specimens as a starting point for her work. She finds inspiration in Karl Blossfeldt’s Art Forms in Nature, John James Audubon’s Birds of America, and James Nasmyth’s constructed lunar landscapes—works by artists who collected and interpreted nature in their own peculiar ways.

McCartney earned an M.F.A. in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002 and currently lives in Minneapolis. She has received both national and regional grants for her work, which has been exhibited internationally. Bird Watching is included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photographers Project, and is featured in a solo exhibition at the Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn until April 23, 2010. A monograph of the series is also available (Princeton Architectural Press, $50). More work can be seen at www.paulamccartney.com.

 

Browse through more images and get additional information about Paula McCartney in a related, web-only collection of artwork and information at mnartists.org.

 

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

by James Naiden

This is an essay of discovery. The work of any poet is regarded, certainly esteemed, by a matter of degrees. While one may agree with Jonathan Sisson that many poets are not inclined to read poetry,¹ it is also true that a few—Seamus Heaney and Thomas McCarthy (both Irish), Robert Pinsky, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, and Robert Bly (all Americans)—have contributed worthy prose to the ongoing conversation about the genre and its practitioners. Heaney’s work is my focus—his themes of love and other affiliations when he’s not concerned with secular, strife-filled matters such as the Irish Troubles of the late twentieth century.

Heaney’s tributes to other poets such as Joseph Brodsky and John Montague evolved naturally. While not “romantic,” these poems are empathetic. Then, too, his love poems are of interest because while he has been married to Marie Devlin Heaney since 1965, his tributes to her are naturally marriage poems, although one of his early love poems preceded their formal union. “Scaffolding” appears in Death of a Naturalist, his first collection:

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.²

Another—“Poem” (for Marie)—evokes wonder at the relationship and is composed in pentameter rhymes and off-rhymes, even half-rhymes, the assonances spare but definite, at times sibilant, as the poet explores both the nature of a shorter poem and his evolving relationship with his wife. This illustrates a durable relationship, not mere flirtation. Here is the final strophe:

Love, you shall perfect for me this child
Whose small imperfect limits would keep breaking:
Within new limits now, arrange the world
Within our walls, within our golden ring.³

As the relationship becomes marriage and maturity evolves, Heaney occasionally faces separation, perhaps very briefly. Here is “Valediction”:

Lady with the frilled blouse
And simple tartan skirt,
Since you have left the house
Its emptiness has hurt
All thought. In your presence
Time rode easy, anchored
On a smile; but absence
Rocked love’s balance, unmoored
The days. They buck and bound
Across the calendar
Pitched from the quiet sound
Of your flower-tender
Voice. Need breaks on my strand;
You’ve gone, I am at sea.
Until you resume command
Self is in mutiny.⁴

Allegiances are a central feature of Heaney’s work—tributes to family members and his peers. “Follower” employs his father as subject, as in the opening and closing strophes:

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.⁵

The well-known “digging” allusions of the first poem in Death of a Naturalist are a vehicle for observing his father and grandfather digging and cutting sod on the farm. The farming analogies with the poet’s unspoken disavowal of physical work favor the tools a poet uses. The opening and closing lines are well honed:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.⁶
(from “Digging”)

Philip Larkin’s terse influence is evident, as well as Yeatsian irony and the bucolic pride of Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), who was also from the north. Heaney’s study of the latter’s poems has been deep and abiding: “I have learned to value this poetry of inner freedom very highly. It is an example of self-conquest, a style discovered to express this poet’s unique response to his universal ordinariness, a way of re-establishing the authenticity of personal experience and surviving as a credible being.”⁷ Indeed, Heaney’s explorations of the craft and his prodigious reading of older poets—Kavanagh, Yeats, Montague, and Denis Devlin—resonate throughout his work. The insistence that his background is as worthy as any undoubtedly flows from Kavanagh. Years later in his 1995 Nobel address, Heaney included Kavanagh among his important poetic forebears, remarking on “the barefaced confrontation” in his predecessor’s oeuvre.⁸

A vital element in his early poems is the Roman Catholic Church. As a Catholic in Northern Ireland, Heaney and his family were in the minority. As such, his references to his faith are sincere but never tendentious. Nonetheless, figures from that tradition inhabit short poems such as “Saint Francis and the Birds”:

When Francis preached love to the birds
They listened, fluttered, throttled up
Into the blue like a flock of words

(tercet break)

Released for fun from his holy lips.
Then wheeled back, whirred about his head,
Pirouetted on brothers’ capes,

Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played
And sang, like images took flight.
Which was the best poem Francis made,

His argument true, his tone light.⁹

If religion has taught Heaney virtue, it is delineated by close observation, as in these taut lines from “Poor Women In A City Church”:

Thus each day in the sacred place
They kneel. Golden shrines, altar lace.
Marble columns and cool shadows
Still them. In the gloom you cannot trace
A wrinkle on their beeswax brows.¹⁰

These observations keenly display the imagery of pathos. It is not a poet’s business to change the world but to observe it with the coins of language melded into tight imagery.

Heaney’s relationship with his father is of pivotal importance. Exploring where his people came from and what his father did for a living to support a large family are central to the poet’s ethos. It is also the reverse image—the mirroring relationships—where he recognizes the tension of roles. Similarly, his relationships even with strangers (who may not have realized a poet was observing) are imbued with unseen energy to and from one person to another, and from the poet to his materials. There is no reprieve from memories—such as a constable who had come to intimidate his father—“A Constable Calls”:

A shadow bobbed in the window.
He was snapping the carrier spring
Over the ledger. His boot pushed off
And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.¹¹

If it is true, as Helen Vendler suggests, that Heaney’s subjects other than family members and peers are anonymous, it is a necessary conveyance. Otherwise, there is a risk of the poem becoming merely a list. “By choosing his subjects as anonymous rural laborers,” she posits, “the young poet erects a memorial to the generations of forgotten men and women whose names are lost, whose graves bear no tombstones, and whose lives are registered in no chronicle. Soon even the tools they used will be found only in museums, and the movements they made in wielding them will be utterly lost. It is immensely important to Heaney to note down those expert movements—like an anthropologist inventing a notation for an unrecorded dance—lest they vanish unregistered.”¹² There are also the identities of rural inhabitants, arguably exceptions. In “The Outlaw,” about Kelly’s “unlicensed bull” kept for inseminating cows, the poet is direct. Here are the final couplets:

His knobbled forelegs straddling her flank,
He slammed life home, impassive as a tank,

Dropping off like a tipped-up load of sand.
“She’ll do,” said Kelly and tapped his ash-plant

Across her hindquarters. ‘If not, bring her back.’
I walked ahead of her, the rope now slack,

While Kelly whooped and prodded his outlaw
Who, in his own time, resumed the dark, the straw.¹³

The title poem of Door Into the Dark, published three years after his first book, comes from the first line of what might be an “anonymous” poem, to borrow from Vendler’s lexicon. The first five and the final four lines are testament:

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and a flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.¹⁴

If one accepts Vendler’s thesis of “anonymities” for the early books (Death of a Naturalist, Door Into The Dark, Wintering Out), one must also believe that any specific reference disclaims the faceless unknown. This is true also with sexual imagery of a poem meant to be comic and composed in unrhymed tercets with supple metaphors:

UNDINE

He slashed the briars, shoveled up grey silt
To give me right of way in my own drains
And I ran quick for him, cleaned out my rust.

He halted, saw me finally disrobed,
Running clear, with apparent unconcern.
Then he walked by me. I rippled and I churned

Where ditches intersected near the river
Until he dug a spade deep in my flank
And took me to him. I swallowed his trench

Gratefully, dispersing myself for love
Down in his roots, climbing his brassy grain—
But once he knew my welcome, I alone

Could give him subtle increase and reflection.
He explored me so completely, each limb
Lost its cold freedom. Human, warmed to him.¹⁵

That the poem is “anonymous” doesn’t matter because we can empathize with its sleek sexuality. The speaker is a water nymph, compliant with the carnal desire of her “anonymous” male counterpart.

Heaney’s next collection, Wintering Out, appeared in 1972. The poet was now thirty-three years old and the father of three children. The book’s title is from the first line of “Servant Boy”—both anonymous (we have no clue where he lived nor is it necessary in order to understand the motifs) and affiliative. The first two lines are the central concern:

He is wintering out
The back end of a bad year . . . ¹⁶

Heaney’s remarks about the poem “Wintering Out” to an interviewer from The Listener (7 December 1972), quoted in a chapter epigraph by Neil Corcoran in his lucid volume about the poet’s work, are worth considering:

It is a phrase associated with cattle, and with hired boys also. In some ways, it links up with a very resonant line of English verse that every schoolboy knows: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent.’ It is meant to gesture towards the distresses that we are all undergoing in this country at the minute. It is meant to be, I suppose, comfortless enough, but with a notion of survival in it.¹⁷

If Heaney is able to depict the abject qualities of a servant boy or poor women in a church, he can also excavate his personal shortcomings. Few poets are as forthcoming. It is a realization that the self is worth examining as much as the quandaries of others. Thus, living abroad—the poet does not say where—with a young family has its travails. “Summer Home” depicts this starkly—the first four lines and then final sections:

Was it wind off the dumps
or something in heat

dogging us, the summer gone sour,
a fouled nest incubating somewhere?

Whose fault, I wondered, inquisitor
of the possessed air.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

My children weep out the hot foreign night.
We walk the floor, my foul mouth takes it out
On you and we lie stiff till dawn
Attends the pillow, and the maize, and the vine

That holds its filling burden to the light.
Yesterday rocks sang when we tapped
Stalactites in the cave’s cold, dripping dark—
Our love calls tiny as a tuning fork.¹⁸

Another vein is redemptive—a broken night’s sleep with one’s beloved, in the first and final strophes of “Serenades”:

The Irish nightingale
Is a sedge-warbler,
A little bird with a big voice
Kicking up a racket all night.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

So fill the bottles, love,
Leave them inside their cots.
And if they do wake us, well,
So would the sedge-warbler.¹⁹

The appearance of North in 1975 marked a change for Heaney, who by then had moved with his family to Glanmore, County Wicklow, in the Republic of Ireland. Tired of being harassed by British soldiers, the Heaneys decided to raise their children in a violence-free atmosphere—as much as possible. The poems in North reflect the increasingly polarized atmosphere in Northern Ireland with its marching Orangemen as well as British constables and soldiers who were less than cordial.

“Bone Dreams” is reflective, as Neil Corcoran has pointed out, of the English invasions of Ireland, not the earlier Viking foray. The fourth and fifth sections of the poem, Corcoran intimates, “are as strange as anything Heaney has written . . . creating a sexual philology and topography; they owe something, perhaps, and they are not entirely unlike some moments in the work of David Jones and of Heaney’s contemporary, Michael Longley.”²⁰ Heaney’s adroitness is afforded a long view in which history, politics, and the visual arts all mirror his consciousness. Here is section IV:

Come back past
philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone’s lair

is a love-nest
in the grass.
I hold my lady’s head
like a crystal

and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes
on her escarpments,
a chalk giant

carved on her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken
fosse of her spine
move towards the passes.²¹

The poet’s fascination with excavated corpses from pre-historic civilizations is displayed in both “Tollund Man” and “The Grauballe Man.” There is his long-abiding interest in Classical civilizations, inspired no doubt by his training in Latin and Greek—

AISLING

He courted her
With a decadent sweet art
Like the wind’s vowel
Blowing through the hazels:

‘Are you Diana . . .?’
And was he Actaeon,
His high lament
The stag’s exhausted belling?²²

If increased tension and deaths in Northern Ireland meant anything to Heaney, it was his sensitivity to victims when retribution was vented on women who “lay” or “consorted” with British soldiers. “Punishment” excoriates Heaney’s own passivity:

I who have stood dumb
When your betraying sisters,
Cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.²³

Despite the violence depicted in North, there are romantic instances such as “Act of Union.” The poet is addressing his pregnant wife:

And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with the pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force . . . ²⁴

In another vein, Heaney has never avoided discussing political machinations of Northern Ireland’s “troubles.” In a four-part poem, “Whatever You Say Say Nothing,” he deplores the conflict. Here are lines from “Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966”:

The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs
Him back on his haunches, lodging thunder
Grossly there between his chin and his knees.
He is raised up by what he buckles under.
Each arm extended by a seasoned rod,
He parades behind it. And though the drummers
Are granted passage through the nodding crowd,
It is the drums preside, like giant tumours.

To very cocked ear, expert in its greed,
His battered signature subscribes ‘No Pope’.
The goatskin’s sometimes plastered with his blood.
The air is pounding like a stethoscope.²⁵

Vendler’s observation about the poet’s force in North is worth noting:

No one could be more conscious than their author that these poems alone could not tell everything about political events and the feelings they evoked in the years between 1968 and 1975. Yet there is no other body of work about those years that so wholly evokes the desperation and devastation felt in that period. North reconstitutes, in powerful symbolic form and tense imaginative language, the impact of those years on one person. That so many readers, both in Ireland and abroad, have found North an unforgettable book means that Heaney’s archaeologies have consolidated the personal into the communicable.²⁶

In 1979 Heaney published Field Work, a departure on one level yet still a continuation of what a poet must do. In “Oysters,” there is celebration of sharing a meal, but a subdued anger at events beyond one’s control. This is made with allusions to the ancient Romans, who also ate oysters, transporting them over the Alps:

I saw damp panniers disgorge
The front-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, all verb.²⁷

Several critics have remarked on the shift of focus from North to Field Work. In the latter volume, there are evocations of dead friends and peers. There is the “triptych” element, a book in three parts. This theory is plausible as any, but not central to the book’s organization. To see it as a triptych is one way of looking at it. Gale C. Schricker argues cogently:

The poems in the first part comment primarily on Heaney’s experience in Northern Ireland before his move; the central sonnet sequence expresses Heaney’s emotions at Glanmore, his first residence in the Republic; and many of the final poems of the volume look to the future, beyond the respite at Glanmore. Undeniably a personal poet, crafting his poetry from his own experience, Heaney seeks to speak also for the larger society to which he belongs.²⁸

The move to Glanmore (near Dublin), County Wicklow, was for reasons of physical safety, as I have indicated. The shift in Heaney’s poetry was also consequential, as he acknowledged to Frank Kinahan a few years later:

I suppose that the shift from North to Field Work is a shift in trust: a learning to trust melody, to trust art as reality, to trust artfulness as an affirmation and not go into the self-punishment so much. I distrust that attitude, too, of course. Those two volumes are negotiating with each other.²⁹

The poems in Field Work are starker, in that Heaney addresses excruciating loss and dangerous precipices in his personal life. “The Strand at Lough Beg”—a eulogy for his relative, Colum McCartney—describes random death by sectarian violence in the summer of 1975. Heaney’s final lines sear into one’s memory:

I turn because the sweeping of your feet
Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees
With blood and roadside much in your hair and eyes,
Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass
And gather up cold handfuls of the dew
To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss
Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.
I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.
With rushes that shoot green again, I plait
Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.³⁰

This is a harbinger of what else the book contains. The very next poem, “A Postcard From North Antrim,” has suggestions of the poet’s early romance with his future wife, but it is also a eulogy, in this case to Sean Armstrong, killed in sectarian violence:

Fifteen years ago, come this October,
Crowded on your floor,
I got my arm round Marie’s shoulder
For the first time.

‘Oh, Sir Jasper, do not touch me!’
You roared across at me,
Chorus-leading, splashing out the wine.³¹

A rush of such lamentations, eulogies, testaments—however one may see them—is inevitable when allegiances are formed. Poets enlist friendships, become mentors or protégés as well as kinsmen “in solidarity,” as Campbell McGrath has observed. Heaney’s friendship with Robert Lowell, twenty-two years his senior, who died of a massive heart attack at sixty while riding in a New York City taxicab, was significant, no less than the younger poet’s deep reading of Yeats and Kavanagh. Thus, “Elegy” is poignant for memories sprung by unexpected death in these middle and final lines:

You drank America
like the heart’s
iron vodka

as you Englished Russian,
as you bulled out
heart-hammering blank sonnets
of love for Harriet . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

you found the child in me
when you took farewells
under the full bay tree
by the gate at Glanmore,

opulent and restorative
at that lingering summertime,
the fish-dart of your eyes
risking, ‘I’ll pray for you.’ ³²

The second, perhaps central, part of Field Work is “Glanmore Sonnets,” addressed to his wife. Throughout these ten sonnets is a strain of appeasing his beloved, as if to apologize for literary matters preoccupying him most of the time. Here are illustrative lines:

Our first night years ago in that hotel
When you came with your deliberate kiss
To raise us towards the lovely and painful
Covenants of flesh; our separateness;
The respite in our dewy dreaming faces. ³³

The final part of Field Work includes “An Afterwards,” “The Otter,” “The Skunk,” “Homecomings,” “Polder,” and the four-part title sequence. “A Dream of Jealousy” has lubricious images that any spouse who has been married a long time might find threatening, if not hurtful. However one reads the poem, it is a remarkable tease:

A DREAM OF JEALOUSY

Walking with you and another lady
In wooded parkland, the whispering grass
Ran its fingers through our guessing silence
And the trees opened into a shady
Unexpected clearing where we sat down.
I think the candour of the light dismayed us.
We talked about desire and being jealous,
Our conversation a loose single gown
Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out
Like a book of manners in the wilderness.
‘Show me,’ I said to our companion, ‘what
I have much coveted, your breast’s mauve star.’
And she consented. O neither these verses
Nor my prudence, love, can heal your wounded stare.³⁴

The penultimate poem in Field Work is “In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge” (killed in France 31 July 1917). That Ledwidge had been a suitor of the poet’s aunt is complemented by regret that his life ended fighting for the British as a Catholic from the North—because Ireland had no real cause in the Great War. Indeed, why should the Irish have fought for the British in any war? Ledwidge did so, and it cost him his life. Writing three-quarters of a century later, Heaney remembers his aunt grieving thirty years after Ledwidge’s death, indeed after yet another world war had come and gone. Perhaps Ledwidge died in a false cause. Here are the final three quatrains:

‘To be called a British soldier while my country
Has no place among nations . . .’ You were rent
By shrapnel six weeks later. ‘I am sorry
That party politics should divide our tents.’

In you, our dead enigma, all the strains
Criss-cross in useless equilibrium
And as the wind tunes through this vigilant bronze
I hear again the sure confusing drum

You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans
But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.
You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones
Though all of you now consort underground.³⁵

The year 1980 was a significant one for Heaney. His first volume of prose, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, was published. This book has twenty essays, from previously published versions or lectures given in the fourteen years since Death of a Naturalist appeared. Preoccupations demonstrates his closest concerns, whether Wordsworth and Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kavanagh, or his sense of place while writing or considering what to write, or the contributions of Theodore Roethke, Stevie Smith, Francis Ledwidge, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon, Brian Friel, Mandelstam, and Lowell, as well as early Irish “nature poetry.”

In 1985, Station Island appeared, arranged in three sections. The central part is about the retreat in Ireland where Heaney went three times in his youth to affirm his religious faith. The third part is of his recapitulations from Sweeney, the ancient Ulster king, offering a different view of Irish culture centuries earlier. Five poems from the first section are tributes of love, respect or friendship: “The Birthplace”; “An Ulster Twilight”; “A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann”; “A Kite for Michael and Christopher”; and “The Railway Children.” I shall discuss the first poem.

“The Birthplace” reflects a visit to the house near Dorchester, England, where Thomas Hardy was born and lived. Never an iconoclastic patriot, Heaney has traveled constantly, paying attention to writers whose books interested him. In Britain, one such writer is Hardy. Others include MacDiarmid, Larkin, and Ted Hughes, with whom Heaney co-edited a book. “The Birthplace” concerns Hardy, whose novels and poems attracted Heaney early and brought the idea of writing into focus. Here is part I:

The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain.
the single bed a dream of discipline.
And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants

of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable
ghost life he carried, with no need to invent.
And high trees around the house, breathed upon

day and night by winds as slow as a cart
coming late from market, or the stir
a fiddle could make in his reluctant heart.

Such descriptions are tremulous in the life of any writer. Hardy’s career, first as architect, then as novelist and finally as poet, was unusual in that he was writing until the day he died in early 1928, at age eighty-seven. Heaney is respectful and not a little in awe of a writer whose death was only eleven years before he was born:

Still, was it thirty years ago
I read until first light

for the first time, to finish
The Return of the Native?
The corncrake in the aftergrass

verified himself, and I heard
roosters and dogs, the very same
as if he had written them.³⁶

Certainly, there is a ruthless self-examination, not unlike the eerie narrative tone of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 novel, The Unconsoled. The tone of Heaney’s poem published a decade earlier is very similar. Ishiguro, a Japanese-born British writer, might have read Heaney’s poem. It is as if the poet witnesses his own actions and does not let himself off easily. Still, as Vendler has observed, his is a non-engaged, non-partisan stance.

In 1988, Heaney’s second collection of prose, The Government of the Tongue, appeared. He is instructive in these essays on prosody and the legacies of Anton Chekhov, Wilfred Owen, Kavanagh, Derek Walcott, the craft of translation, Elizabeth Bishop, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and Lowell. Some of these essays first appeared in literary journals, others are derived from university lectures. This book contains Heaney’s beliefs on the craft of making poems and what moves a poet in the first place.

Discussing Plath’s work, Heaney presents his own credo: “I do not in fact see how poetry can survive as a category of human consciousness if it does not put poetic considerations first—expressive considerations, that is, based upon its own genetic laws which spring into operation at the moment of lyric conception.” ³⁷ In the book’s introduction, Heaney sets down reasons for writing about poetry: “Writing these essays helped . . . to verify what I believe anyhow: that poetry can be as potentially redemptive and possibly as illusory as love.”³⁸ A year later, in 1989, his third book of prose, The Place of Writing, appeared—and he was also elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. He had affirmed his role as poet-critic, although with a measure of self-restraint. By now he had turned to East European poets such as Czeslaw Milosz, Miroslaw Holub, and Zbigniew Herbert. As Vendler observed, Heaney “sought out the conditions of poetic freedom in authoritarian or totalitarian circumstances. The deftness and inventiveness with which Eastern European poets, feeling the state pressure for political correctness, managed to evade it was one focus of Heaney’s inquiry; but an equal focus was their steadily maintained indifference to such pressure. . . . he has posed, in both specific and general ways, the question of the role of writing within a framework of human suffering.”³⁹ In Heaney’s words: “The fact is that poetry is its own reality and no matter how much a poet may concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and historical reality, the ultimate fidelity must be to the demands and promise of the artistic event.”⁴⁰

In 1991, Heaney’s eighth book of poems, Seeing Things, was published. In this luminous volume, he reaffirms his central quest for depth of meaning. In “Casting and Gathering,” dedicated to Ted Hughes, Heaney offers his own preferences: “I love hushed air. I trust contrariness. / Years and years go past and I do not move / For I see that when one man casts, the other gathers / And then vice versa, without changing sides.”⁴¹ In “The Schoolbag,” dedicated to the memory of John Hewitt, Heaney recalls a “handsewn leather schoolbag” forty years in the past: “Learning’s easy carried! The bag is light, / Scuffed and supple and unemptiable / As an itinerant school conjuror’s hat. / So take it, for a word-board and a handsel. . .” The poem’s tribute, one might argue, is to a deceased friend, although the “you” is clearly the poet himself as a child, or the dedicatee. The connection is ambiguous.

While poems in The Haw Lantern address his mother’s passing, Seeing Things provides the same purpose for his father, who died in 1987. The poet recalls his father’s close call at having almost drowned, and it is here, as Jonathan Allison suggests, “Heaney’s own face-to-face meeting with his father’s shade emerges.”⁴² Hence: “That afternoon / I saw him face to face, he came to me / With his damp footprints out of the river, / And there was nothing between us there / That might not still be happily ever after.”⁴³ One critic remarked on the mystical, ethereal quality of Heaney’s verse, or at least his perceived direction: “Heaney’s diction is now more sparse, the narrative style more discursive and easy-going, but this has not led to any diminution in the intensity and resonance of his poetic voice.”⁴⁴ If anything, Seeing Things is a cumulative book. The poet has, as it were, bade farewell to his father in remembering him. In this sense, the book is a romantic testament. He addresses his wife and pays homage to poets and friends no longer alive. Seeing Things is a distillation of the poet’s sensibilities at fifty-two.

In 1995, Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Irish poet to be so honored since Yeats went to Sweden seventy-two years earlier. I refer the reader to the full text of Heaney’s Nobel Lecture, a model of poetic decorum, mingled with a call for poets to do their work regardless of travails. His concerns are about the fratricidal wars in his homeland, and also of the other places where poets bear and have borne witness. The poet, Heaney reminded his audience, wants his work, the poem itself, “to be not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock that sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad standing there blue with cold and whispering her fear, enduring the terror of Stalin’s regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it.”⁴⁵

Reactions to his Nobel Prize and his acceptance speech were euphoric. Scholars who had written on Heaney’s work held forth in newspapers, journals, and interviews about the significance of an Irish poet winning the most coveted of literary prizes. Michiko Kakutani praised Heaney’s work in the long tradition of world literature. “If one can find affinities in Mr. Heaney’s verse with such Irish contemporaries as Thomas Kinsella and Patrick Kavanagh,” she wrote in The New York Times, “one can just as easily find correspondences with a wide assortment of English and American poets. In Mr. Heaney’s closely observed paeans to the physical world are echoes of Hardy and Frost; in the wonderfully supple, musical phrasing of his poems can be heard the ghosts of Hopkins and Stevens.”⁴⁶ One scholar of Irish literature suggested that reading Heaney in larger amounts is best. “You have to read him by the book,” suggested Thomas Dillon Redshaw. “The individual poem doesn’t work well if it floats free of context.”⁴⁷

Almost overshadowed but not unnoticed in 1995 was the publication of a new collection of critical prose, The Redress of Poetry. Heaney’s subjects range from Christopher Marlowe to George Herbert to Elizabeth Bishop. The book received plaudits befitting his new status as a Nobel Laureate. A few months later, his next collection of poems,The Spirit Level, affirmed the notion that metaphor can sustain a poem, however isolated and brief. The Spirit Level has many poems of love and tribute. “Because this collection contains many occasional pieces and poems dedicated to friends, on first reading, I wondered when things were going to start heating up,” wrote Richard Tillinghast.⁴⁸ Indeed, “things” do not heat up, but merely evolve with the poet’s attention flowing from instance to person and back again. The individual poems mount up to a steadfast vision, as in Heaney’s earlier collections of poetry and critical prose. Remembering his childhood and a train ride with his siblings, Heaney is subdued in these closing tercets from “A Sofa In The Forties”:

Out in front, on the big upholstered arm,
Somebody craned to the side, driver or
Fireman, wiping his dry brow with the air

Of one who had run the gauntlet. We were
The last thing on his mind, it seemed; we sensed
A tunnel coming up where we’d pour through

Like unlit carriages through fields at night,
Our only job to sit, eyes straight ahead,
And be transported and make engine noise.⁴⁹

On the next page is an affectionate address to his brother, Hugh, who stayed in Northern Ireland to farm: “My dear brother, you have good stamina. / You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor / Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people, / You shout and laugh about the revs, you keep / Old roads open by driving on the new ones. / You called the piper’s sporrans whitewash brushes / And then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen, / But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong . . .”

As Vendler has observed, one of Heaney’s concerns has been how poets and writers survive, if they do at all, in repressive political cultures. His tiny poem simply titled “M.” is a salute across the continent of Europe and the decades since Stalin’s long terror:

When the deaf phonetician spread his hand
Over the dome of a speaker’s skull
He could tell which dipthhong and which vowel
By the bone vibrating to the sound.

A globe stops spinning. I set my palm
On a contour cold as permafrost
And imagine axle-hum and the steadfast
Russian of Osip Mandelstam.⁵⁰

Heaney’s love for driving an automobile is one way to let his thoughts clear. In the final poem of The Spirit Level, he makes time for an autumn drive along the west Irish coast. “Postscript” conveys both ruefulness and vulnerability—here are the final lines”:

You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.⁵¹

In 2000, Heaney produced a bestselling translation of Beowulf. No doubt the book’s popularity owed something to his Nobel Laureate status, but it was also due to his having acquired an American publisher more than two decades earlier. When his eleventh volume of poetry, Electric Light, appeared in 2001, one critic couldn’t resist a backhanded compliment:

Who knows, furthermore, what kind of blessing a Nobel Prize can be? It is an arrival; poetry, on the other hand, lives by departures. Perhaps the literary Nobels should be awarded for one year only and then canceled—the honor, that is, not the money. Poets need money, if only to encourage the young.

Nobelization, a simultaneous swelling and freeze-drying of the voice, has been alleged by Mr. Heaney’s several detractors in Ireland and Britain. (He has hardly any in America, where we are not crowded or threatened by him, but enlarged.) They find him prone to let his engagement with the moral and political questions of his time sag into a kind of lofty poetic bestowing.⁵²

Another commentator noted the many tributes to literary forebears. “Heaney’s skill,” wrote Fredric Koeppel, “is to find such connections in the fundamental material of everyday existence yet mediated in the life of the mind. Electric Light may be intensely reflective, even nostalgic, but it’s also Heaney’s most learned and allusive, revealing the broad range of his reading and his comfortable acceptance of the European heritage.” In another vein, in one tiny poem sub-titled “The Party,” Heaney displays good humor:

Overhead at the party; like wet snow
That slumps down off a roof, the unexpected,
Softly powerful name of Wilfred Owen.
Mud in your eye. Artillery in heaven.⁵⁴

Heaney also pays homage to Brodsky. His salute to the Russian poet is undoubtedly the most vivid poem in the book. Here are the final quatrains of “Audenesque”:

Nose in the air, foot to the floor,
Revving English like a car
Hijacked when you robbed its bank
(Russian was your reserve tank).

Worshipped language can’t undo
Damage time has done to you:
Even your peremptory trust
In words alone here bites the dust.

Dust-cakes, still—see Gilgamesh—
Feed the dead. So be their guest.
Do again what Auden said
Good poets do: bite, break their bread⁵⁵.

Remembering the electrification of rural Ireland when he was a child provides the title poem. Here are representative lines:

In the first house where I saw electric light
She sat with her fur-lined felt slippers unzipped,

Year in, year out, in the same chair, and whispered
In a voice that at its loudest did nothing else
But whisper. We were both desperate

The night I was left to stay, when I wept and wept
Under the clothes, under the waste of light
Left turned on in the bedroom. “What ails you, child,

What ails you, for God’s sake?” Urgent, sibilant
Ails, far off and old. Scaresome cavern waters
Lapping a boatslip. Her helplessness no help.⁵⁶

In 2002, a comprehensive “selected” edition of Heaney’s critical prose,Finders Keepers, made its welcome appearance. Though a long book, it contains many salient essays and lectures since his first collection of verse in 1966. Many essays are reprinted in full or at least in part—on prosody, and on Lowell, Plath, Hughes, Kavanagh, MacDiarmid, Yeats, Larkin, Edwin Muir, Norman MacCaig, Robert Burns, John Clare, Elizabeth Bishop—and of course making both poems and commentary on matters concerning poets, conceivably anything under the sun. One has to make choices, to make those discrete paeans to the craft of writing and making art, thereby ennobling human existence in a candle’s light.

District and Circle was published in 2006, forty years after Death of a Naturalist, seventeen books earlier. Now Heaney was sixty-seven, no longer the ambitious young poet but much garlanded with fame, respect, and money. Still, he was as he had always been—uncorrupted, realistic, and fatalistic about Northern Ireland, where a tenuous peace had held for only a few years. The sonnet form appears here in various guises—Petrarchan, unmetered or “free-verse,” with Heaney’s own rhyme schemes and meters described by Brad Leithauser as “rough-hewn, hand-honed.”⁵⁷ As with their predecessors, many of these later poems are derived from memories. The fifth slender strophe of “To Mick Joyce In Heaven” illustrates this:

“To Mick Joyce in Heaven”—
The title just came to me,
Mick, and I started
If not quite from nowhere,
Then somewhere far off:
A bedroom, bright morning,
A man and a woman,
Their backs to the bedhead
And me at the foot.
It was your first leave,
A stranger arrived
In a house with no upstairs,
But heaven is enough
To be going on with.

The title poem—a sonnet—is strong, tense, and decidedly political, but still riveting for uncertainty of the other’s thoughts, possible responses, depicted in these final lines:

As the music larked and capered
I’d trigger and untrigger a hot coin
Held at the ready, but now my gaze was lowered
For was our traffic not in recognition?
According passage, I would re-pocket and nod,
And he, still eyeing me, would also nod.⁵⁸

Heaney’s fascination with ancient peoples—whether “civilized” in historically recognized cultures or not—has always given heft to his poems. A stunning six-sonnet sequence, “The Tollund Man In Springtime,” reflects this curiosity. These sonnets are composed as if this ancient man could address us now. The question arises: who is the speaker? Here is the mysterious ending of the sixth sonnet:

. . . . . .Dust in my palm
And in my nostrils dust, should I shake it off
Or mix it in with spit in pollen’s name
And my own? As a man would, cutting turf,
I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit,
And spirited myself into the street.

Homages to Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, Dororthy Wordsworth, W. H. Auden, Edward Thomas, Horace, and Milosz abound in District and Circle. These are names one knows immediately, for all are apt and intriguing writers. Still, as Leithauser astutely notes: “Mostly, though, the gaze is planted backward, often toward the modest-plotted rural Ireland of his childhood. Heaney is far more elegist than prophet.”⁵⁹ Not surprisingly, in his tribute to Neruda, who died in 1973, Heaney describes the joys of anticipating crab apple jelly on bread, thinking of the late Chilean poet in these final lines of “To Pablo Neruda In Tamlaghtduff”:

For now,
O my home truth Neruda,
Round-faced as the crowd
At the crossroads, with your eyes
I see it, now taste-bud
And tear-duct melt down
And I spread the jelly on thick
As if there were no tomorrow.⁶⁰

To mark the new decade, both ours and his own, Heaney spoke to a BBC interviewer about his life’s work and what it means after observing his seventieth birthday the previous spring. The context is the poet’s concern for Northern Ireland. As Catholics living there, Heaney and his family members were among the minority. Even his name was cause for concern: “My name is Seamus, which is an Irish name for James. Within the Northern Ireland situation, that is a code for Catholic, unreliable perhaps . . . certainly not a Unionist, though not necessarily a supporter of the IRA.”⁶¹ Heaney’s remarks illustrate the quandary many artists faced during this period of “the Troubles.” What was needed, then, was a new dynamic of language, and referring to Yeats, who died in 1939, Heaney—born that same year—emphasized in this interview that government has never helped solve the problem, especially an intransigent British government and the fierce resentment kindled among the Northern Irish themselves. “It’s up to us to establish a new language, a civic language, rather than a language of resentment and bigotry.” In other words, as Yeats had said many decades earlier, it can be only the citizen’s choice. The artist plays a pivotal role here. “Yeats said he wanted to hold in a single thought reality and justice,” Heaney reflected. “It’s very hard to do but in a situation of great polarization, of blame, of political stalemate, the self is distressed. It’s stressed and distressed. It yearns for some kind of at-oneness in the world. It yearns for harmony and is offered stalemate. So at that point, in a cornered situation, I think that’s when an artist has to escape into a work.”

The peace has held fairly well, but with the memories of fratricide, the poets can help by “making space in official language” for dialogue. Heaney went on to speak optimistically about Barack Obama, whose unusual personal history and literary instincts have helped to create international conversation and negotiations rather than constant shouting and obduracy. This, Heaney emphasized, is a great shift in tone when there was very little, if any, dialogue before. Pessimism and rigidity go nowhere. The poet’s tools are language and persistence.

Seamus Heaney’s gift of words is what we choose to make of it. The poet has presented his offering. We have only to behold these joyous, saddening, whirling, tragic, and uplifting precipices of language. If the ancient writers still speak to those of us who read them, so does this poet speak to and of our own time—if we pay attention.

¹ Jonathan Sisson, “The Secret of Poetry,” The North Stone Review, issue #14, 2002, 157.
² Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (Faber & Faber, London, 1966), 50. Hereafter cited as DN.
³ Ibid., 48.
⁴ Ibid, 46.
⁵ Ibid, 24-25.
⁶ Ibid, 13-14.
⁷ Seamus Heaney, “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh,” The Government of the Tongue, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1990), 14. Hereafter cited as GT.
⁸ Seamus Heaney, “Crediting Poetry,” Nobel Lecture, 7 December 1995. Copyright © 2002, The Nobel Foundation. Hereafter cited as NL.
⁹ DN, 53.
¹⁰ Ibid., 42.
¹¹ Ibid., 60-61.
¹² Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998), 20.
¹³ Seamus Heaney, Door Into the Dark (Faber & Faber, London, 1969), 16-17.
¹⁴ Ibid., 19.
¹⁵ Ibid., 26.
¹⁶ Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out (Faber & Faber, London, 1972), 17. Hereafter cited as WO.
¹⁷ Neil Corcoran, A Student’s Guide to Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber, London, 1986), 71. Hereafter cited as NC.
¹⁸ WO, 59-61.
¹⁹ Ibid., 62.
²⁰ NC, 112.
²¹ Seamus Heaney, North (Faber & Faber, London, 1975), 21. Hereafter cited as N.
²² Ibid., 42.
²³ Ibid., 30-31.
²⁴ Ibid., 43.
²⁵ Ibid., 62.
²⁶ Vendler, op. cit., 55.
²⁷ Seamus Heaney, Field Work (The Noonday Press / Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1979), 11. Hereafater cited as FW.
²⁸ Gale C. Schricker, “’Deliberately At The Centre’: The Triptych Structure of Seamus Heaney’s Field Work” (Eire-Ireland, Volume XXVI, Number 3, Fall 1991), 109.
²⁹ Quoted in chapter epigraph, NC, op. cit., 127.
³⁰ FW, op. cit., 18.
³¹ Ibid., 20.
³² Ibid., 31-32.
³³ Ibid., 42.
³⁴ Ibid., 50.
³⁵ Ibid., 59-60.
³⁶ Seamus Heaney, Station Island (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1985), 34-35. Hereafter cited as SI.
³⁷ GT, op. cit., 166.
³⁸ Ibid., xxii.
³⁹ Helen Vendler, “A Nobel for the North,” The New Yorker, 23 October 1995, 85.
⁴⁰ GT, op. cit., 101.
⁴¹ Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1991), 15. Hereafter cited as ST.
⁴² Jonathan Allison, a review of Seeing Things (Eire-Ireland, Volume XXVI, Number 3, Fall 1991), 140.
⁴³ ST, op. cit., 20.
⁴⁴ Jonathan Allison, op. cit., 141.
⁴⁵ NL, op. cit.
⁴⁶ Michiko Kakutani, “An Observer Reflecting On Mankind’s Strivings,” The New York Times, 6 October 1995.
⁴⁷ Mary Ann Grossmann, “Heaney’s Honor Wins Praise From Colleagues, Admirers in the Twin Cities,” Saint Paul Pioneer Press, 6 October 1995.
⁴⁸ Richard Tillinghast, “Poems Into Plowshares,” The New York Times Book Review, 21 July 1996, 6.
⁴⁹ Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1996), 12. Hereafter cited as SL.
⁵⁰ Ibid., 68.
⁵¹ Ibid., 82.
⁵² Richard Eder, ”‘Electric Light’: Seeing the Present in the Glow of the Past,” The New York Times, 20 April 2001.
⁵³ Fredric Koeppel, “Heaney’s at peace with mystery in affirmative gaze backward,” Commercial Appeal(Memphis, TN), 24 May 2001.
⁵⁴ Seamus Heaney, Electric Light (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 2001), 66.
⁵⁵ Ibid., 79-80.
⁵⁶ Ibid., 96.
⁵⁷ Brad Leithauser, “Wild Irish,” The New York Times Book Review, 16 July 2006, 12.
⁵⁸ Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2006), 17.
⁵⁹ Leithauser, op. cit.
⁶⁰ Heaney, op. cit., 67.
⁶¹ This interview was broadcast by the BBC on 16 January 2010. The interviewer was Laurence Pollard. “IRA” refers to Irish Republican Army.

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While Mary Karr’s 1995 book The Liars’ Club is often credited with sparking the memoir boom of recent years, few of the memoirs to follow hers have lived up to its standard. What makes Karr’s writing so rich is not the stories themselves—though it doesn’t hurt that many of them are pretty wild—but her psychological acumen, her facility with language, her unapologetic honesty—and most memorably, her charismatic narrative persona. Karr followed The Liars’ Club with Cherry, which continued the story of her childhood and adolescence in east Texas, and now takes on her adult years in Lit (Harper, $25.99), which describes her struggle with alcoholism and her conversion to Catholicism. In addition to these groundbreaking memoirs, Karr is also the author of four books of poetry (including 1998’s Viper Rum, which contains her controversial essay “Against Decoration”), and is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University. I was lucky enough to meet Karr during her recent book tour. When the tour was over, we conducted the following interview over the phone.

Scott F. Parker: You’re best known as a memoirist, but you came up as a poet. There’s a lot of poetry in your memoir and a lot of memoir in your poetry. You even wrote as an eleven-year-old that you wanted “to write ½ poetry ½ autobiography,” which is exactly what you’ve done. I wonder, do you think of yourself as primarily a memoirist or poet, or does that distinction matter much to you?

Mary Karr: I think of myself as a poet. The memoirs, to be honest with you, if I didn’t get paid for them, I wouldn’t write. Poetry is much more of a passion. Obviously nobody pays me for it. I only write the memoirs for money—well, I guess that can’t be entirely true, because I do have a sense of responsibility to the written word, and to anybody who would read my books. I wouldn’t want to bore them. So I care about quality. If somebody is going to put down $25 for this book, and spend hours reading it, goddamn it, I better bring something to the fucking party.

SFP: In your first two memoirs you wrote about your childhood, and there’s this gap between how it was, and you have lots of room to tell the story of how that character became this narrator—but you don’t have to identify very closely with the kid, because that’s some other person. With Lit you come much closer to writing about you. It gives the book real confessional feel, and I imagine it makes the writing much more difficult.

MK: It was a nightmare. I saw my girlfriend, who’s a shrink—not my shrink, just a friend who’s a shrink—and she said, “I don't know how you fucking did this. I remember you eighteen months ago sobbing and saying, ‘I’ve written twelve hundred pages and every one of them is bad. I’m going to publish a shitty book.’” I just can’t stand to fail on this scale when I’ve put this much money in the bucket. I’ve invested seven years—that’s half of my publishing life, and a third of my writing. Fucking nightmare. But I don’t know, it got better. It’s not Speak, Memory, but it’s not as bad as it was.

SFP: Your writing is psychologically astute, and one thing you return to regularly in your memoirs is the therapy you’ve undergone. Is that why there’s always a big time gap—even with Lit there’s still about a fifteen-to-twenty-year gap between the story and the writing—you need the time to work through your issues before writing about them? Or is writing part of that working through?

MK: People need to do the therapy before the memoir. In therapy you pay them, and in memoir they pay you. And hopefully that’s because that’s the nature of the relationship—you’re giving the reader something—not the reader giving you something. I think people who mistake the memoir as therapy are usually quite boring. They think that because their lives were interesting to them and painful, they should write a memoir. I think everyone’s life is painful. Like the Buddhists say, life is suffering. But that’s a different thing than a work of art. A work of art is, hopefully, artful!

SFP: Is that the difference, then, between having a life and having material for a memoir?

MK: I think there are people who aren’t self-aware and use the memoir as an excuse to explore themselves. People always say, “Was it cathartic writing the book?” Of course it’s cathartic writing any book, but I think the big catharses came before the book was written: all the shocks and surprises about who you are and what’s happened to you—the way you’re ambushed by the truth.

SFP: So how do you know if you’ve got a memoir?

MK: You don’t know. How do you know when you have a novel or a poem? The only way is through the writing. But you have to think of it as a work of art, not as something you’re doing for your own satisfaction. If it’s private, don’t publish it and don’t make us read it. If it’s just for you, that’s fine, but then there’s no need to murder trees to have it see the light of day.

SFP: So what would have happened if you wrote The Liars’ Club in the early ’80s? Is that why you started writing it as a novel, because not enough time had passed?

MK: I don’t know . . . we always remember through the filter of who we are at the time. If I wrote The Liars’ Club now it would be different. I think you’re a different person every instant of your life, so the filter I remember myself through now is different than the filter I remembered myself through when I was writing that book. It doesn’t mean the events are different; it just means I would probably feel different about them and therefore render them differently.

SFP: Speaking of the filter of memory, in all of your memoirs you use a lot of filmic language. You zoom in on scenes, you rewind, images dissolve and are sometimes lost, etc. You also narrate a lot in present tense, which gives the reader the feeling of watching your life as a movie. At the same time, you don’t write as if there’s a documentary of your life that you’re accessing; you’re always pointing out the flaws of memory (e.g., mentioning when you don’t remember something, or that your sister would disagree). How do you think about memory in memoir?

MK: I think the film device, unfortunately, is just pretty common to our era, when film is the dominant art form. It’s the art form we’re all addicted to and affected by, so I don’t think that’s something particular to me. Novelists do that, too. I’m trying to create an experience in the reader. I’m not trying to recreate an experience that happened to me. I’m trying to make the reader feel something, have an emotional experience that will be powerful for them. So I’m not recounting things because they happened to me; I’m trying to make a work of art the way a novelist would or a poet would. I’m trying to assemble a machine that the reader puts the penny of his or her attention into and pulls the handle and gets out a feeling.

SFP: In Cherry your friend Meredith says suffering “teaches you about the human heart. Suffering and despair force you to plumb the depths of the human heart in a way normal life can’t. It makes us wise beyond our years. Most people just go along.” In the same book you say that as a kid you read to escape your loneliness. Is suffering necessary to read? To write? In Lit you describe being unable to write when you’re medicated and happy.

MK: I think you can lead a very comfortable and privileged life and have access to the whole realm of human feeling by reading. And that’s the beauty of it. You know the first Noble Truth is that life is suffering, and I’d like to claim I thought of that, but I didn’t—it’s a truism that people suffer. You walk into a Christian church, in my case a Catholic church, and there’s somebody nailed to a cross, suffering. I think it’s at the point of suffering that we become loneliest for God, and the most abject suffering is the kind that is sort of godless. As I quote Simone Weil in Lit, “Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence, there is nothing to love.” That kind of suffering is complete emptiness, but somewhere on the spectrum of suffering we’re almost hardwired to turn to God, to turn to something beyond ourselves. There’s a nexus between God and suffering; by being pulverized, the heart is tenderized.

SFP: So what does religion give you that literature doesn’t?

MK: What religious people would tell you is: the Truth. The best literature is always about spiritual truths or metaphysical truths or moral truths. I think any great work of literature has all of those things in it. But however interested we are in, say, Raskolnikov or Anna Karenina, they’re not meant to be models in the way, say, Jesus is. For myself, I learned compassion, to feel for other human beings, partly through suffering. I remember when my son was a kid and some other kids were throwing snowballs at him and picking on him and really beating the shit out of him, and him saying, “Why would God let this happen?” And I said, “First of all, it’s not God who’s throwing snowballs at you, it’s the little assholes down the block. And secondly, you’re going to grow up and be really good looking, tall, you’re going to be smart, and if you didn’t have somebody kick your ass you wouldn’t necessarily have compassion for people in pain. You wouldn’t know what it feels like to be picked on and left out. This experience is going to permit you to empathize with people.” I think that’s exactly true. And literature does teach us that. I remember reading Faulkner (and, you know, I grew up around people who were often very mean and hateful—if they didn’t like you they’d kill your cat, they’d put firecrackers up its ass and light them; these were bad people), but reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, reading about the inner sufferings and inner lives of people who were illiterate, made me more compassionate toward people I might have otherwise written off. I think Faulkner really gave me a kind of humanity that I might not have had. In that sense, literature is Eucharistic. You take somebody else’s suffering into your body and you’re changed by it, you’re made larger by their pain. You come to understand pain in a way that maybe otherwise you wouldn’t.

SFP: And religion?

MK: I think religion’s meant to be the Truth. It’s something people don’t think about much anymore. They think of the Bible as literature, something you may or may not read, but religious literature—the Upanishads, the Vedas, the Koran—that’s supposed to be the word of God. That’s supposed to be the Truth. So while we might get some of the things from great literature that people from various religious traditions get from the scriptures, none of those things really represents itself as capital-T Truth.

SFP: Okay, well in Lit you go to lengths to accommodate the skeptical reader. You have these parentheticals that say, We’re going to talk about God now or You may want to skip this part.

MK: Yeah. I didn’t want to lose readers who really thought it was horseshit. I didn’t want to bore anybody. I was trying to give people a pass. But I started to believe this stuff—that was genuinely my experience.

SFP: Reading the book, I get that. It’s clear how much Catholicism has helped you, and it’s very moving to read that. But the thing a reader like me gets hung up on is how you make the move from religion as being helpful to religion as being True.

MK: Yeah, but that’s my truth. If you think it’s true there isn’t a God, you get to believe that. We all get to believe what we think is true. That shouldn’t bother anybody. I’m not running a crusade and I don’t proselytize. I think the Holy Spirit assumes many forms, and I think God was in my life when I was praying before I was baptized; before I was Christian I think I was being guided by God. So it’s not like God was saying, “Go fuck yourself, you’re in the wrong line.” I still feel that way. This is the path I’ve chosen, but atheists believe atheism is true—that doesn’t hurt my feelings. I believe God is guiding us all to refine our souls in whatever way it is for each of us. Walt Mink [a college professor described in Lit] was an atheist and also one of the most Christ-like people I’ve ever known. That’s just true. He didn’t need baby Jesus, he didn’t go to mass every week. But I need this shit. This is necessary, this practice. People make the mistake of confusing religion with theology or ideology or history or ideas . . . religion is a practice. So it’s sort of like watching a lot of porn movies and thinking you know about pussy. You just don’t. Until you’ve gone through the practice of it.

A lot of my cradle-Catholic friends have had horrible experiences in the Catholic church. Horrible. Hideous. I think there’s a lot of evil in any hierarchy, and the Catholic church is full of hierarchies, but so is every faith. Every faith has the big dog and the little dog, the most holy and the least holy. And I mistrust them as much as you do. I don’t have any more confidence in them. There could be a pope that’s Satan—that seems completely likely to me! So I still have a lot of cynicism. But I’ve chosen this practice. I don’t think you need to be a Christian to be guided by God or to access what I’d call the Holy Spirit or what the Native Americans would call the Great Spirit. I think that’s a breath away for each one of us. So I don’t need to protect Jesus from people who don’t believe in him. It’s kind of comical. That’s what a lot of Catholic theology says, that you can’t have communion because you’re going to hurt Jesus’ feelings or something. It’s crazy. If you read anything about Jesus, he just wasn’t that kind of guy.

SFP: So it sounds like you’re not all that interested in the metaphysical stuff.

MK: Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about death this year because my priest is dying, and I go to see him a lot. And I have a friend who’s dying of ovarian cancer. Father Kane, who baptized me, is teaching me a lot about death, and the quality he has that I most admire is this strange sense of reality. He’s a realistic person. He’s not off in la-la land dreaming that he’s going to be living with Jesus. His attention is right exactly where his ass is. He’s just right where he’s sitting. And it sucks. He has cancer on his head like bloody tree bark that went from being as big as a nickel to being about half as big as my hand, and he can’t use his legs, and someone has to wipe his ass. And when I asked him, “Is that humiliating for you?” he said, “Not at all.” And I believe him. I don't think it bothers him in the least. He said, “It’s a blessing, really, that people’ll do it.” So I believe there’s something that goes on. I sincerely doubt that it’s me, Mary Karr, wearing my high-heeled boots, sitting around on a cloud. And if I were meant to know about it, I think God would tell me about it. I kind of just feel like it’s none of my business, like what I need to pay attention to now is really trying to be a—Reinhold Niebuhr, the great theologian, was fond of quoting those great William Blake lines: “And we are put on earth a little space / That we may learn to bear the beams of love.” So for me that’s trying to be a loving presence in the world, which is a real challenge—I’m not that nice a person. That’s hard for me. And also to try to give those beams off, to do something good and useful. But that doesn’t mean to be crucified, which I think is how people think of this thing.

SFP: One of the challenges you describe in Lit about getting sober was putting down your intellectual guard.

MK: I want it to make sense. And what’s hard for me about people like, say, Christopher Hitchens, is that he can’t imagine that there’s a mystery he doesn’t understand. To me, the arrogance of someone thinking that they know inside and out about the universe and how it works . . . I admit that it’s entirely possible that I’m full of shit and this is wrong. I understand that. But does it help me any to live that way, to think that way? It just doesn’t work for me. I’m not Walt Mink. I’m not a nice enough person.

SFP: Another surprise for anyone who reads Lit after reading The Liars’ Club is the extent to which your life becomes like your mother’s—even if your sister points out there are still plenty of differences.

MK: It’s funny, people say that, but my mother never lived in the same place for more than a couple years. I’ve had the same job for eighteen years. I was married to Michael Milburn for thirteen years. I mean, my mother didn’t pay taxes. The degree to which my mother was feckless and irresponsible . . . No one ever paid my rent. My mother never supported herself. I always supported myself. I was afraid in those moments with my child as a parent I would become her.

SFP: Okay, but with the drinking—

MK: That was like my daddy. I drank much more like my daddy. I drank mostly alone and hid my drinking. My mother was somebody who would go out and get drunk and tell everybody to go fuck themselves and tip things over in the supermarket. But her love of beauty, her love of clothes . . . I’m just passionate about pretty clothes, and I have her extravagance, a lot of her capriciousness. But I’m not as good looking as my mother. My teeth are reasonably straight, I’m not hideously fat or anything, but no one ever thought of me as a great beauty. My mother was really very pretty as a young woman.

SFP: When I read The Liars’ Club I kept seeing you as your dad’s daughter and your sister as your mom’s daughter. It seems like as you got older you moved closer to your mother.

MK: Yeah, my father was totally out of my life by the time I was twelve years old. My mother was never nurturing and she was capricious, but she was there. She wouldn’t get on a plane to see you, but she’d talk to you on the phone if you called her, which my father wouldn’t have done. But of course morphing into mother was my fear. I said to my sister when I was in the loony bin, “I’m turning into Mother.” She said, “You pay your taxes.” My parents didn’t take care of me, but they didn’t take care of themselves either.

SFP: Do you feel some separation from Lit now? Is it still difficult to be involved with it?

MK: I don’t pay that much attention to it. I know that sounds disingenuous because I’m on the road and I talk about it all the time, but it’s not something I have to do now. It’s sort of like—Did you hate high school?

SFP: No.

MK: You’re somebody who liked high school? Well, did you hate college?

SFP: I liked it less than high school.

MK: Okay, if you look back on college and you think, God, I fucking hated college, you’re not feeling that hatred now. It’s an idea to you. You know, so-and-so broke up with me in 1976 and I was devastated. But remembering that, I’m not devastated now. So it’s the same thing. Writing this book was really hard when I was writing it, but I’m not writing it now. The truth is, I don’t read this book. I talk about something that happened to me a long time ago that I don’t really have to worry about anymore because I’m not doing it. I relived it all while I was writing. That’s why it was so hard. Writing about my mother, writing about my father, writing about David [Foster Wallace], who just fucking hung himself, writing about my baby and me not taking good care of him—I felt like shit, absolutely. But when I go around and promote it, now that it’s written, I don’t think about it. I’m sure there are all sorts of devastating things in your life that you think about and think I’m really glad that’s not happening anymore, but you don’t actually feel that pain after you’ve been through it. And it’s the same thing for me: I don’t feel the pain of having written the book. I’ve already written it. It’s out there. If people think I’m an asshole, oh well. What am I going to do? Once it was written it was okay if it failed and everybody hated it. I knew that I had done as well as I could do, and it was as good as I could make it.

SFP: You write in the prologue to Lit, a letter to your son, that you’re telling your own story in the hopes that one day he’ll be able to tell his own. Do think that’s one of the projects of memoir, for the narrator to claim his or her story?

MK: No, I think it’s one of the projects of becoming a grown-up. And, in fact, I think you have to be a grown-up before you can write a memoir—otherwise, put a fucking cork in it, and don’t waste my time. You have to be a grown-up to be able to ruthlessly examine what happened. I wrote this book three times—and that’s multiple drafts each time. I wrote it the first time to remember what happened. I wrote it the second time to get some psychological perspective. Each one of those times took years. And then the third time, I was doing some work on the religious stuff and what I call lapidary work, just trying to make the sentences good. You look at the sentences in it, and if it says, “I went to the store,” you think,That’s a pretty fucking tedious sentence. How can that be better? “My mother drove me to college.” No,My mother’s car moved like a Monopoly icon through fields of Iowa corn. That’s just a better fucking sentence. I got that from reading Isaac Babel. He has some amazing sentences. I have a voice that I know how to do, that has certain qualities of syntax and diction that I’ve cultivated over years. This book is not in the same voice as The Liars’ Club and Cherry, but it’s akin to it, you can tell it’s the same person. If it seemed like a totally different person it would be weird.

SFP: You told me the first time we met that the last page of The Liars’ Club is a hint in the direction of your religious conversion. Cherry ends on a similar note, with you reassured you are your Same Self (though it will take decades to find out what this is). And of course this is all made explicit in Lit when you describe that transition.

MK: That’s a very adroit reading. I never thought of it that way, but that’s probably true.

SFP: So finding Catholicism was the key moment in you becoming you.

MK: Yeah, and that’s what I tell people all the time. I remember telling David this when he was really depressed. I tell people now when they’re trying to quit drinking, or when they’re just really unhappy. I say, “Okay, you’re sitting in Bar X, or you’re in bed with Man X, snorting cocaine off his dick, and you feel like an asshole because you don’t even like him and you find him disgusting. Who is telling you that’s disgusting? No one knows this is happening but you. Who is that? There’s a voice that says, ‘that’s disgusting, you stupid bitch,’ and there’s a voice that says, ‘you can really do better than this.’ Who is talking to you?”

I differ from the most diseased part of myself, and I think that an irony of spiritual practice is that when you get out of yourself you kind of more become yourself. When I was a little kid I was bouncy and I made a lot noise and I broke shit. I ran around, I was very enthusiastic. In all the pictures of me I’m smiling. Now, I’m pretty happy. I laugh a lot. I have joy on a given day. I’m not a blithering idiot, and I suffer when it’s hot out or it’s raining and I can’t get a cab. I worry about my kid or my friend getting chemo or whatever. I suffer. But I’m pretty happy. And it’s almost like, I remember my mother saying when I was getting sober, “you’re going to come back to that [childhood happiness].” And I said, “Mother, I don’t even fucking remember that.” I just don’t remember feeling that way. But I really think that voice—not the one that says, fuck you, you stupid bitch, you’re a whore, but the one that says, you can do better than this, honey—that voice is God. And that’s actually who you really are. The other stuff that’s telling you what an asshole you are all the time is fucking noise, your ego or your head or whatever. The Buddhists would call it your ego. Pentecostals would call it Satan. It doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s my fucking head talking. My girlfriend with cancer, she goes online and looks that up and looks this up, and I say, “Are you going to become a fucking oncologist? Do you have any more information having done this eight months in?” “No, I don’t.” “So then, why fucking do it? What are you doing? You’re stabbing at stab wounds.” So I think that part of all of us, not just of me, is who we really are, is what our soul is like; there’s light in there, and it’s loving, it’s not terrified, and it’s not angry, and it’s not sad. I see it with Father Kane. I call him and say, “I feel bad you’re suffering like this.” And he says, “I know you do, but I can handle it.” That’s amazing to me.

SFP: So if all three books combine to tell the story of how you became you, and you’ve covered most of the years of your life up to that becoming, are you finished as a memoirist?

MK: Absolutely. I’m writing poems right now. I can’t imagine writing anything but poems. I have these notes for this book on memoir that I would like to write, because people act like it’s some mysterious thing. James Frey says there’s a lot of argument between what is and isn’t nonfiction. You know, there really isn’t. If you didn’t talk to me for this interview, and then wrote down what I said, that would be a fucking lie. This is not hard. A lot of this stuff I’m saying about writing a memoir is just obvious—I’m not that smart. But people really have to care about the reader. The reader’s been left behind. Everybody talks about the writer’s feeling and the writer’s expression and the writer’s experience, and, you know, I don’t give a fuck how the writer feels. I want a fucking book that I can be in love with. I want a book that I’ll reread seventeen times. That’s what I want. And that has nothing to do with how I fucking feel. If I cared about how I felt I wouldn’t have written this fucking book in the first place. It was too hard to write. I needed the money or I wouldn’t have done it. Swear to God, I would not write these books if they didn’t pay me. But that said, once I’m committed to it and once I’m going to put my name on it, I feel like I ought to try not to bore the dog fuck out of people. If people are nice enough to buy my book, it’s like, let’s just try not to make them pitch forward with boredom. I’m so sick of reading boring books. I get them in the mail all the time. I got four today. [Sounds of rummaging through books.]Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields.

SFP: Reality Hunger’s not boring.

MK: The cover says, “If you’re sick of conventional writing . . . ” I’m actually not that sick of conventional writing. I just want good conventional writing, as opposed to bad conventional writing.

SFP: Then you might want to check out Zadie Smith’s response to the book. While Shields thinks we’re grasping for truth in a world full of lies, Smith thinks fiction can still be relevant when it’s done well.

MK: It’s about quality. And people won’t talk about quality anymore, because they’re afraid it excludes people who write badly. Let’s exclude them! I can see people wanting truth, too. But I think it’s more that we don’t believe in objective truth anymore. The subjective has an ascendency. My memory, I admit, is corrupt. You know that my memory is corrupt. So it’s not that it’s not corrupt, it’s that I admit it’s corrupt. People find that friendlier. Also, I think people are writing novels about people no one likes. No one fucking likes the characters. When you read Charlotte’s Web, you like Charlotte and Wilbur and Templeton. When you read To Kill a Mockingbird you like Scout and Boo Radley. You like everybody in the fucking book. You want to see them again. And there are a lot of people who are stand-ins for allegory or ideology who I just don’t fucking like. I find them tedious.

SFP: I originally read The Liars’ Club in a class, and when we finished the book someone said, “She had all this terrible stuff happen to her, her family was crazy, but at the end of the book you think that’s a family that loves one another.” And it makes the reader like them as characters.

MK: Yeah, I liked my mother. My boyfriend says all the time, “I can’t believe your mother did X or Y or Z,” because, believe me, whatever’s in the book doesn’t scratch the surface. She was so capricious. But if you met her you’d fucking like her. She was smart. She’d be very interested in whatever you had to say. She’d ask you questions, genuinely. She’d say what she thought. She was witty. She read a lot of different shit, so she would have all kinds of different ideas. And when was the last novel you read where you think, God, I want to reread this because I just don’t want this to be over yet? I reread One Hundred Years of Solitude because I miss those people. If I don’t read that every couple years I feel like I haven’t visited my friends or something. I think that’s the problem. People aren’t that interested in how the reader feels. They’re interested in getting across some ideology or making a point about something that’s usually pretty fucking self-referential. Even though it’s not autobiographical, it’s often very much about them and their enterprise and their life and what they care about.

SFP: So what are you trying to give the reader?

MK: People say, “You wrote this to help the reader.” I’m like, “No, I didn’t.” I did not write this book to help people. I’m thrilled if it helps people, obviously. But I did not write this book in order to help. I’m not that nice. I’m really not. I promise I’m not. I’m not just pretending I’m not.

SFP: But it’s more than just entertainment.

MK: I want them to have a deep emotional experience that humanizes them, because when we feel together we share each other’s feelings, not just mine but anybody’s. A lot of times I want you to feel ways that I didn’t feel at the time. Sometimes I thought I was having fun, and when you see me you’re probably going to feel disgust. It’s not about replicating my feelings for you. It’s about creating an experience for you that allows you to know exactly what it’s like. My shrink said, “I’ve never read a book [prior to Lit] that helps me understand why somebody keeps getting drunk even though it’s clearly a bad idea. I just really didn’t get it.” That’s good; she now understands something that she never experienced. The same as when I talk to her about medicating psychotics and she tells me stories, I have a feeling for what she does. And when we empathize with each other, that’s where God is. I think these novels that are so heavy on ideas, while perfectly clever, often just show their cleverness. They’re not in the business of creating feeling. That’s not what they’re trying to do. They don’t care about that. I think the minute that novelists start caring about that, memoirists will be out of business. It’s like Wallace Stevens says, “People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.” Insert novels there. The problem isn’t that the culture is too dumb to understand what the brilliant novelists are doing, the problem is the novelists are so self-involved that they really think that how they feel should fucking matter, that people need to be edified to how they view the fucking world, and that’s going to help them somehow, that’s going to make people smarter or something. Well, I don’t think people are that fucking stupid. If you look at critical or literary history, before Wordsworth nobody was thinking about how the fucking artist felt. Everybody was thinking about the reader.

SFP: Maybe we can end then by talking about memoirs you’ve most enjoyed. What were you reading when you wrote The Liars’ Club?

MK: I’d read quite a few. I’d been teaching memoir at Tufts since 1985. Always read a lot of memoirs. Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior. Those would probably be my top four.

SFP: And post-Liars’ Club, what have been your favorite memoirs?

MK: The book I just read that I’m excited about is by Hilary Mantel, called Giving Up the Ghost. I really liked Frank McCourt’s [Angela’s Ashes]. I read it in manuscript and thought it was pretty damn good. I even blurbed it. I get a lot of memoirs I don’t like.

SFP: What don’t you like about them? Do they tend to make the same mistakes?

MK: I think they do. First off, they’re just not that well written. The sentences aren’t so interesting, and they don’t seem to understand that how it’s written makes any difference. Also I think people really try to make themselves seem bizarre and grotesque, like whoever has taken the biggest ass-whipping wins. And then they become sort of like characters on Jerry Springer. They don’t really evoke any feeling—other than gratitude that you’re not related to any of those people.

Click here to purchase Lit at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Liars' Club at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

by Luke Sykora

Witold Gombrowicz's fiction is hyperactive, grotesque, philosophical, juvenile, lyrical, serious, ironic, existential, and confrontational—in other words, it harnesses just about every technique that a fiction writer could hope to master. Milan Kundera called Gombrowicz one of the greatest writers of the last century, and Gombrowicz was a central influence on North America's latest writer-in-translation darling, Roberto Bolaño.

English language readers who have been lucky enough to pick up and enjoy Gombrowicz in the last ten years probably have Danuta Borchardt to thank. A former psychiatrist and a native of Poland, Danuta Borchardt has translated three Gombrowicz novels into English during the past decade: Cosmos,Ferdydurke (for which she won the 2001 National Translation Award) and, most recently, Pornografia (Grove/Atlantic, $23). Astoundingly, this was the first time that Pornografia—Gombrowicz's penultimate novel, which tells the story of two adult men sharing a bizarre erotic obsession with a pair of Polish country youths in the midst of World War II—has been translated directly from the original Polish (a previous English version was based on a French translation).

Borchardt's own short fiction has been published in Exquisite Corpse, and her translations of the poetry of Cyprian Norwid have appeared in The Green Integer Review, The Dirty Goat, and Salmagundi. I spoke with Danuta Borchardt about her new translation of Pornografia, as well as the unique challenges and rewards of reading and translating Gombrowicz's fiction.

Luke Sykora: Pornografia is the third novel by Witold Gombrowicz you've translated. What is it that attracts you to Gombrowicz's work, and why do you think it's important that contemporary English readers read him?

Danuta Borchardt: My attraction to Gombrowicz’s work evolved quite fortuitously. Since the 1980s I have been writing my own short fiction in English. At some point I attended a seminar led by Andrei Codrescu, who had already published a few of my pieces in his journal Exquisite Corpse. During that seminar, Andrei talked about his favorite Polish writers: Bruno Schulz, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, and Witold Gombrowicz. I happened to have at home Gombrowicz’s novel Cosmos (in Polish), and I began reading it. It struck me how beautiful it would be when translated into English, and I decided to try my hand at it, even though I had never translated anything before. I felt that both my surrealistic bent and my somewhat idiosyncratic style were in synchrony with those of Gombrowicz. I admired his down-to-earth attitude toward life and literature. He did not mince words. He was an iconoclast.

As far as his relevance, there is a striking passage in Ferdydurke: “the face of the 20th century, the century of all centuries gone mad.” And this is even before the subsequent horrors of World War II. Or: “Tut, tut, as everyone knows, mankind needs myths—it chooses this one or that one from among its numerous authors (but who can ever explore or shed light on the course that such a choice has taken?)” Gombrowicz is talking here about authors, but it applies to any modern-day myth-making. His importance for the contemporary reader also lies in his place in 20th-century thinking and literature—he was a forerunner of the existential movement in Europe (Ferdydurke was written a year before Sartre’s Nausea). Pornografia missed, by a narrow margin, the prestigious International Editors Prize for Literature in 1966, but his novel Cosmos won it the following year. In 1968, Gombrowicz was a runner-up for the Nobel Prize.

LS: What makes Pornografia unique, compared to Gombrowicz's other novels?

DB: Pornografia focuses, perhaps more than his other three novels, on the outer limits of the imagination—on the “forbidden”—on the erotic fantasies of middle age and on living them through the young, and on manipulations that influence the young to the point of crime and murder.

Also, in Pornografia Gombrowicz tests the notion of belief in God versus non-belief. According to Jerzy Jarzębski, one of Gombrowicz’s foremost scholars: “Pornografia is blasphemous in the sense that it presents traditional culture and national customs in a state of exhaustion and atrophy.” Jarzębski, suggests that Gombrowicz’s ideas may originate from the existentialists’ “death of God,” from old age generally, from World War II and the demands it placed on Polish society, and from the collapse of moral values.

LS: You mention Gombrowicz's response to Polish traditional or national culture. What did mainstream Polish culture at the time mean for Gombrowicz, and why was he so frustrated by it?

DB: This comes up in most of his writings. When he was writing Ferdydurke, the Polish psyche was steeped, after 150 years of occupation by foreign powers, in newly regained freedom. He was reacting to the glorifying of national heroes, artists, etc., the nation forgetting perhaps that a lot of work was yet to be done at the level of improving the lives of ordinary citizens. Understandable, but perhaps exaggerated, because a lot was achieved in the twenty years of independence between the two World Wars. In his short story “The Memoirs of Stefan Czarniecki,” Gombrowicz bemoans the rising enthusiasm for nationalism and for yet another war that was approaching and that was to destroy Poland again. In Pornografia, he expresses weariness with such war mentality. Trans-Atlantyk, written in Argentina, is a satire on the Polish émigré society in Argentina. But this is only on the surface, because he addresses the larger issues of Poland’s inability to carve for herself an existence on the larger geopolitical arena. “Go, go, again and be killed” he says in effect to his compatriots returning from Argentina to Europe at the outbreak of World War II. He also makes fun of the Polish character in its adherence to outdated social mores such as duels—which, by the way, were no longer taking place in 20th-century Poland—and to name-dropping, to “do you know who I am?” posturing. As I’m saying all this, it becomes apparent, I think, that all these concerns and, most important of all, his recognition of the stupidity and futility of wars as a way of solving problems, apply to all, not only Polish, societies.

LS: Pornografia is set in World War II, but the war is mostly a distant backdrop for the central action. The only major war-related character is a Polish resistance fighter, and he is painted in a fairly unflattering light. Why do you think Gombrowicz chose to set this novel during World War II?

DB: Gombrowicz himself addresses this in the “Information” section of Pornografia (a sort of preface): “Pornografia takes place in the Poland of the war years. Why? Partly because the atmosphere of war is most appropriate for it. Partly because it is very Polish—and perhaps it was initially conceived on the model of a cheap novel in the manner of Rodziewiczówna or Zarzycka (did this similarity disappear in its subsequent adaptation?) And partly just to be contrary—to suggest to the nation that its womb can accommodate conflicts, dramas, ideas other than those already theoretically established.”

I might add that although World War II is a “distant backdrop,” there are ominous foreshadowings to some of the action. Placing the first scene, the café scene, smack in the middle of the German occupation (1943), the fear of the general situation that Hipolit expresses in his invitation to Witold to visit him in the country . . . Perhaps it is easier for those who have gone through a war to sense this “backdrop” of danger than for those who have not.

LS: You were born in Poland, and came to the West as a refugee during World War II. How closely can you relate to the world of the Polish countryside that Gombrowicz depicts in Pornografia? Does it seem familiar, or alien, or maybe somewhere in between?

DB: I relate to the Polish countryside very closely—it is totally familiar to me. As a child, I spent a couple of summers (1938 and 1939) at my grandparent’s country place near Wilno (then Polish, now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). I remember those times as some of the happiest of my childhood. For example, my father taking me by the hand and leading me to a swamp area that he wanted, some day, to convert into a pond. Of course this never happened because of the outbreak of World War II.

LS: Pornografia depicts two adult men sharing a bizarre obsession with the erotic feelings of the adolescents in their midst. But compared to many other novels, Pornografia doesn't seem very pornographic at all, in the sense of overt depictions of sexuality. Why do you think Gombrowicz titled the novel Pornografia? What, if anything, is “pornographic” about the novel?

DB: The title is somewhat of a teaser. To quote Gombrowicz again: “At that time [he is talking about 1953] it wasn’t such a bad title, today, in view of the excess of pornography, it sounds banal, and in a few languages it was changed to Seduction.” Anyway, Gombrowicz does not consider his novel as solely a voyeuristic exercise, but more as a vehicle for dealing with wider issues.

LS: Why do you think Witold Gombrowicz decided to have Pornografia narrated by a character named “Witold Gombrowicz”?

DB: All of Gombrowicz’s works are narrated this way. Some might consider it a mark of his egocentricity (for example, his Diary, a series of magnificent essays on philosophy, art, literature, politics, etc., begins: “Monday—I. Tuesday—I. Wednesday—I. Thursday—I.”) But this would be a facile interpretation. It is more germane to say that Gombrowicz wants to show us—in a very direct way and not through third-person characters—what we are as human beings, as individuals, with all our frailties, all our evil thoughts and deeds, and how to free ourselves from our shackles. He is a master at making the elegant distinction between Gombrowicz the author, the narrator, and the character.

Gombrowicz puts forward the idea of the “individual” first inFerdydurke, in his argument that it’s the “brat” in us, the immature part, which is the springboard for our creativity. Also, in the philosophical passages where he urges us to be true to ourselves: “the most important is not: to die for ideas, styles, theses, slogans, beliefs; and also not: to solidify and enclose ourselves in them; but something different, it is this: to step back a pace and secure a distance from everything that unendingly happens to us.” The philosophical passages in Ferdydurke are particularly worthy of attention in this respect. Secondly, in Trans-Atlantyk, as well as in his other works, he shies away from the idea of being primarily a Pole, not a very popular idea with the closed-minded. One should be first and foremost an individual, a human being.

LS: Gombrowicz's writing can sometimes be purposefully amateurish and goofy. He seems uncomfortable with the traditionally “classical” understanding of beauty and art, involving balance, proportion, elegance, and the like. As you translate him, is there ever a temptation to sanitize is prose, to tone down his more exuberant and idiosyncratic tendencies?

DB: Writing in a purposefully “amateurish” and “goofy” manner is the very essence of Gombrowicz’s style. It is his way, I think, of showing the struggle between Form and Chaos, two of his most important philosophical categories. One might view his “goofiness” as a way of letting go of established norms in writing. Also, since this style makes his prose so lively and vibrant, it is so important, and often difficult, to convey it in English. However, one cannot deny that many passages in his novels are also written in absolutely beautiful poetic prose, and I keep hearing remarks to this effect about the translations. This is not, I can assure you, due to any manipulation of his language on my part. And no, I am never tempted to sanitize his prose or tone down his idiosyncrasies. As a matter of fact, when I must choose among several options I go for the most extreme, as long as it is true to the original, and as long as the English language can tolerate it. Since language is so vital in Gombrowicz’s work, translating it from other languages did not work, and hence there was the need for re-translating it directly from the Polish.

LS: There are indeed a lot of incredibly lyrical passages in Gombrowicz. I think that's one of the most challenging but also interesting and unique things about reading his work—at one moment he can be playing the buffoon, and the next moment he is a poet.

DB: I absolutely agree. And Gombrowicz was also adept at using various Polish vernaculars, when the occasion called for it: the usual language, "intelligentsia" language, peasant language, Leon's crazy language, and, of course, Gombrowicz's own language. The apogee of this occurs in Trans-Atlantyk, and there was a special reason for this. The novel is a tragicomedy. Gombrowicz wrote it at a time when he was deeply troubled by the war, his country being destroyed, his family and friends in terrible danger. Yet here he was, in Argentina, away from it all, and helpless. He decided that, in order to gain distance as a writer, he would write something in a language removed from his time. So he wrote it in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century Polish, as well as in the language of Polish peasants who had emigrated to Argentina at the break of the 19th and 20th centuries. These older varieties are not greatly removed from present-day Polish, but they would be in the English language. You can imagine what a formidable task this is for a translator!

LS: What about the languages themselves? Are there any significant challenges in translating Gombrowicz's Polish into English?

DB: The challenges are enormous. The clearest is the issue of verbs; in Polish, verbs can be omitted without loss of meaning. This makes it necessary to insert them where Gombrowicz does not. Omission of verbs in English is occasionally acceptable in colloquial language, or as a literary device, but not as a norm. Another problem is Gombrowicz’s overuse of diminutives, which hardly exist in English. Gombrowicz does this to accentuate the artificiality and pomposity that many Poles indulge in as they’re speaking. The most prominent issue is Gombrowicz’s introduction of an unusual use of idioms and his creation of neologisms. Some of these have entered into the Polish vocabulary. In all these respects,Ferdydurke was the most difficult to translate. But Trans-Atlantyk was also difficult, according to the author himself, and as I mentioned earlier.

LS: Is it difficult to translate humor from one language to another?

DB: Yes, because it is so strongly ingrained in local cultural and social mores. However, if one is attuned to it in the original, the equivalents can be found in the target language. I feel strongly that a translator must be endowed with an innate sense of humor to pull this off.

LS: This brings up the issue of context—Gombrowicz's sense of humor, his satire, sometimes targets elements of mid-century Polish culture that most modern American readers are probably not familiar with. Many readers are probably more familiar with Shakespeare's England—or maybe even Dante's Florence—than with Gombrowicz's Poland, which I imagine is an added challenge when it comes to translating him.

DB: I think I touched on this earlier, for example: the everyday lingo with diminutives, the puffing up, the name-dropping, the chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, the “I must defend my honor” kind of posturing, all of which are satirized in Trans-Atlantyk, and also the nationalist ideology and concomitant hero-worship (among ourselves and among foreigners: “Chopin was Polish, we have Marie Curie-Skłodowska,” etc., etc.). Actually, I don’t think these present challenges in translating Gombrowicz, it’s the particular language that he uses to convey them that poses difficulties in making them sound humorous. For example, he uses a lot of idioms that, Poland being (and having been at his time even more so) primarily an agricultural society, originate from nature (land, animals). These don’t quite work in English.

LS: Gombrowicz had been living in Argentina for almost thirty years by the time he wrote Pornografia.Why didn't he write it in Spanish?

DB: Gombrowicz was not Joseph Conrad, who became immersed in a foreign language when he was about seventeen. Although Gombrowicz has learned Spanish to some degree, he had already become a seasoned writer in Polish (short stories, Ferdydurke, a couple of plays, Diary, Trans-Atlantyk) by the time he was writing Pornografia, his penultimate novel.

I can say from personal experience that it is very difficult to be a writer in a foreign language. I began learning English when I was about thirteen, and it took me a long time and practice, practice, practice, to attain a somewhat literary level. Although I have Polish “in my gut,” it would take an extraordinary amount of work for me to write in literary Polish. For one thing, I don’t live in Polish society, I’m not surrounded by the language. Although I keep up with the changes that are occurring in the language through reading and occasional visits to Poland, these are not the mainsprings that a writer needs. You might say that Czesław Miłosz wrote poetry in Polish while living in the U.S. but, again, he was a mature writer when he arrived here. There is also, for me, something special in the English language: I like what I consider its simplicity, its logic, its unconvoluted grammar. God forbid trying to write in German with its grammar and undending words! Yet I know Polish well enough to understand its (and Gombrowicz’s) nuances. My parents (and I in my childhood) grew up on it.

LS: Has spending so much time with Gombrowicz's prose influenced your own experience of reading and writing fiction?

DB: The reverse happened. It was my experience of writing fiction, as well as reading (Cheever, Barth, Barthelme, Beckett’s novels), that led me to spend so much time with Gombrowicz. Also, it was not only his prose but the process of translating it that has led me to know English better has and influenced my writing. Writing and translating are cross-pollinating processes. Had I been a writer in Polish, Gombrowicz might have influenced my writing, but I’m not sure. What is quite certain is that he had an influence on such South American writers as Cortazár and Bolaño.

Click here to purchase Pornografia at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Ferdydurke at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

by Christopher Luna

Part One: Michael Rothenberg’s Choose and Poetic Lineage

Michael Rothenberg’s passion for poetry is complemented by a keen wit and a finely tuned bullshit detector. His collections of poetry include Man/Woman (Two Windows Press), a collaboration with Joanne Kyger, The Paris Journals (Fish Drum Press), Monk Daddy (Blue Press), and Unhurried Vision(La Alameda/University of New Mexico Press). Also a noted editor, he runs the online zine Big Bridgeand has produced several important volumes for the Penguin Poets series, which includes selected works of Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer, and Ed Dorn. His most recent editing project was theCollected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press).

Choose (Big Bridge Press) is Michael Rothenberg’s latest collection of poetry, a stimulating selection of works written over the last decade that finds the poet investigating his place in the world. Like the best poetry, his observations ask us to take a closer look at people and places we may have come to take for granted. It is an emotional, funny, and sometimes tragic catalogue of Rothenberg’s experiences, in which the writer masterfully transitions between the inner and outer landscape as he engages with his physical environment in locales as diverse as Paris, Miami, New Orleans, and Guerneville, California.

 

Christopher Luna: Tell me about your upbringing, which you describe in "Mink Household" as "very middle class." How did your middle class background influence your writing?

Michael Rothenberg: I can’t answer this question. I don’t even like the idea of class. What is a middle class writer? I am more interested in undermining class ideas than in defining them or stating my sociological/psychological case. What is middle class really? Supporting the status quo? Confusing sushi with Zen Buddhism? I try to stay out of jail—which class is that?

If I believe in overthrowing the system, is it because I am, or was, middle class, or in spite of the fact? Can you be a working class liberal? How about an upper class conservative who is addicted to OxyContin and reruns of American Idol? How many TV sets do you own? Do you go to school? Do you want to be a doctor? Where do you buy your clothes?

When I was growing up we had a lot of “stuff,” and my family and the families in the Miami Beach stetl of the ’50s all thought we were on top of the heap, kings of the mountain. Now it’s obvious that lots of people have lots of stuff, regardless of class, and nobody can afford it—all this stuff is killing us. But all classes like to feel their power through their stuff. I have this bone I chew on everyday. My power bone. How about the quality of the water we drink and air we breathe? The middle class and above can afford bottled water and an iron lung—how fortunate!

Class is largely a delusion. The more we make of class the worse it gets. Is this middle class thinking on my part? Or would I have to have been middle class to begin with, and then to have rejected my middle class upbringing in order to come up with this sort of thinking?

CL: Many of the poems in Choose are poems of relationship. How have your personal relationships changed you or your writing?

MR: I am not sure I have learned anything from personal relationships—except to avoid them. No, really, I try to be nicer and listen better. Yes, I write about personal relationships, but I don’t write relationship poetry. I mean, I have a poem about my high school girlfriend who committed suicide, and even that I don’t think of as a relationship poem. Life is full of all kinds of relationships, and not just to people, and it influences us and our writing, of course.

CL: Several of the poems in the book are based on memories. What did compiling your older poems teach you about who you are today?

MR: One thing I learned is that considering and dating poems based on older and newer is a vanity. Old poems are new now because they ring true in a way they didn’t when I wrote them. I have a habit of burying my new poems and reading them later, and that way getting some distance on them. It is too hard to edit a new poem and make it ready for prime time without letting it cook for a few centuries. I do remember a lot, though, still. I guess compiling older poems and including them with more recent poems reminds me that poems aren’t written to be good for a season. That there is no essential difference between the old and the new. I might have shifted my subject matter some and I hope I have become a better writer. Maybe I am less nostalgic as I have gotten older.

CL: You work with the list form in some of these poems. Is this an attempt to take inventory of your life?

MR: I like the list because it is a comfortable way for me to make a narrative, a kind of imagist narrative, through juxtaposition. I prefer it to storytelling. I mainly work with fragments and so the list is a succession of my personal fragments.

CL: What is your greatest source of frustration with the current state of poetry? Similarly, what are we doing well?

MR: I am aggravated by the abundance of poetry “cliques” and the lack of general good fun and spirit among poets and in poetry crowds. There are too many categories of poetry and not enough celebration—too many poets and poetry gatekeepers full of themselves. I am tired of the “professional” poets, stylistic dogmatism, and rehashing of old experiments. There is a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder in poetry that is epidemic, and we are supposed to like it. People don’t get to learn from each other because they are busy preaching to the choir. I think poets and artists are too sheepish. They require certification and endorsement and are reluctant to speak out, shout out, and mix it up.

An example of what we are doing well is best exemplified by a recent performance I was at in St. Louis. I liked it because the styles of poetry were diverse, the voices diverse—hip hop, beat, spoken word, multi-racial, multi-generational, multi-gender, poetry with music, poetry without music, music without poetry, and it was a full house. There was dancing at the back of the room while the band played on. There are a lot of poets writing poetry and making their own way, and some excellent ones who are not waiting to be given permission to exist and to riff. These are the poets who will make the difference to future generations.

CL: What is your sense of your own poetic lineage? Who are the poets you look to as elders?

MR: I guess I would have to say my poetic lineage is closest to The New American Poets, particularly the Beats, Black Mountain, and San Francisco Renaissance poets. Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Bob Dylan were influential voices. John Keats and Hart Crane! I dig Villon, William Carlos Williams, Tu Fu, Sylvia Plath, Kenneth Patchen, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, and Mayakovsky. I am omnivorous. I try not to blame people for the way I write.

CL: In "Be More Dying," you describe the indignities suffered by Philip Whalen in his final days. You took care of Whalen at the end of his life. What is the poetry community's responsibility to its elders' legacies and their personal health?

MR: The poetry community should take care of its elders—nobody else will. Whalen’s case was especially problematic in that I felt a couple of different communities failed him: the Zen community and the poetry community. Of course, those communities overlap in many ways, which might have made things more problematic. Of course, there were people who stepped in to assist Philip—it wasn’t like he was left in a ditch—people came to visit him, but they didn’t work as advocates with the health care system, and that is what was needed. He would have been better served by some form of home care rather than being shuttled into some dreary extended care facility because he wasn’t dying fast enough. I don’t think he got the treatment he deserved. But I think that in American society, this is a problem overall . . . the inability to see and treat “the elder” as deserving great respect and honest care. This feeling of responsibility and humanity is not quite all there in the younger people who surround the “wise man.”

CL: Please tell me about Shelldance and how it led to the relationships you formed with Joanne Kyger, Michael McClure, and others.

MR: I came out to California from Florida with Nancy Victoria Davis in 1975. Together with my brother, we decided to start Shelldance, a tropical plant nursery specializing in bromeliads. We saw them in Florida and thought they were pretty amazing. We found an old nursery for lease in Pacifica on some condemned highway property owned by Caltrans. It was supposed to become a freeway interchange for Highway 380 but the project got hung up waiting for money. It was also bogged down in mutterings from the environmentalists on the coast who wished to see around 1000 acres become part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It’s a very long story.

Shelldance became well known around the plant world for its collection of bromeliads and other exotic plants. We had an amazing bromeliad collection, which began with the acquisition of one of the oldest bromeliad collections in the world, David Barry’s California Jungle Gardens collection in L.A. We moved tens of thousands of plant up from L.A. by truck. We had to learn fast. And because of its scenic location on a hill on Highway 1 overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Shelldance caught the imagination of a lot of people. We became a kind of tourist spot. And I got very involved with environmental struggles on the coast and the effort to see the nursery land and the adjacent Sweeney Ridge included in the National Parks. So eventually, Shelldance developed a reputation for being both a great place to see rare plants but also a place to connect up with environmental movement on the northern California coast. The Park Service has a record of my oral history on the environmental movement on this part of the coast if you are interested.

So word got out to Margo Doss about Shelldance. Margo Doss was an environmentally minded journalist with a column in The San Francisco Chronicle called “Bay Area at Your Feet.” Margo wrote about interesting places, cultural attractions, many that needed to be protected from development or something like that, and that would benefit from public awareness. The column came out on Sundays and you could buy the paper on Saturday night and plan to go walk with Margo at the featured location the next afternoon. Sometimes thousands of people would show up on a Sunday afternoon and walk with Margo. It was a very popular column. Margo featured Shelldance in her column, called it “Bromeliad Fever.” About 1,000 people showed up.

We set up a booth to inform people about the movement to save Sweeney Ridge and stop the development of 380, and served gallons of pineapple juice and gave tours of the greenhouses.

So during Margo’s interview for her column, she found out I was a poet, too. That’s how I found out about Bolinas. It turns out Margo was a kind of catalyst in the Bolinas Literary scene. She was friends and acquaintance with everyone who ever set foot in that town: Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Lewis MacAdams, Tom Clark, David Meltzer, Bill Berkson, the list goes on . . . She knew them all, maybe put them up when they needed a place to crash. Her husband John Doss was a doctor, digger, and poet. It was quite a scene. There’s a whole book about Bolinas by Kevin Opstedal at Big Bridge you can check out. I don’t think you can understand the San Francisco Renaissance or how poetry moved through the U.S. in the last half of the 20th century without looking at Bolinas. Everyone came through that town. But I didn’t know anything about Bolinas until I met Margo. She invited me to come out to Bolinas cause she thought I should meet Joanne Kyger and her partner Donald Guravich. I met Bill Berkson that same time. I ended up doing a collaborative book with Joanne, Man/Women, and edited her selected poems, As Ever, for Penguin Books.

Joanne suggested Nancy Davis and I go meet Philip Whalen. She made the introduction and Philip came out to Shelldance. Nancy made him noodle soup and we walked through the nursery and gave him an educational tour. He was very sweet and courteous. We became very close friends. Nancy sat zazen with Philip, and I developed a habit of coming to town to meet Philip for lunch. Eventually we would work together on Mark Other Place, a selection of poems, mostly unpublished, that became a chapbook on Big Bridge online, which would be integrated into the text to Whalen’s Some of These Days, published by Clifford Burke. We worked together on Overtime for Penguin Books. I miss Philip.

Michael McClure was another story. There was this amazing ornithologist and director of the Academy of Sciences, Luis Baptista, who used to come out to Shelldance to buy bromeliads and just talk about flowers. Luis was a genius, a beautiful human being, a true Renaissance man. He could sing any birdsong known to man and I think he could speak a hundred languages. We ended up working on a broadside together, “Elegy for The Dusky Seaside Sparrow.” Luis was friends with McClure and thought I should definitely meet him, that McClure would love Shelldance. This was pretty cool to me. Of course everyone knows McClure, and Meat Science Essays was enormously influential for me. It was a book of enlightenment and permission. The book helped me understand how a poet could and should be a biologist, horticulturist, and environmentalist. Creating Shelldance made sense because of a book like Meat Science Essays. In the ‘60s and ‘70s you didn’t have to be a specialist, a professional poet locked away in a library—you could actually learn about everything, go outside and embrace a more physical world; geology, astronomy, biology, religion, and art were all unified, and you could be active in environmental concerns in a hands-on, personal way, and be better for it. Meat Science Essays helped me understand that.

So Luis brought McClure out to Shelldance and I gave him a tour of the bromeliads. Like Kyger, McClure was interested in my efforts to get the nursery and the adjacent lands of Sweeney Ridge into National Park protection. We hiked up to the top of Sweeney Ridge together with Luis and scientist Sterling Bunnell. McClure and I started hanging out together after that. I’d go into town and visit him in the Haight for lunch. Shelldance had a shop in the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park at that time, and we would go walk through the Conservatory glass house or check out reptiles at some of the pet shops.

So it was Shelldance and not the “poetry scene” that became the basis of my relationship with McClure, Kyger, and Whalen. And you know, Nancy Davis is a great artist. She did a hand-watercolored book,Book for Sensei, which incorporated poems from McClure, Kyger, Whalen, Jim Harrison, Andrei Codrescu, and me in an accordion binding. Nancy also illustrated Man/Women. So it was a pretty organic evolution, the way we met and all got together. Even my getting to know Jim Harrison had more to do with plants, at least in the beginning, than it did with poetry. You know his novel Dalva? We did the research for him on windbreaks and plants and trees that showed up in the landscape of that book.

I was never comfortable with schmoozing downtown at poetry readings and events. I kept to the nursery and my activities in Pacifica. There is something reassuring to me that the basis of these relationships began with a common love of nature and not poetry politics.

Part Two: ROCKPILE on the Road

Poets Michael Rothenberg, David Meltzer, and Terri Carrion recently returned from ROCKPILE on the Road, a nationwide tour they documented online as it progressed. They were accompanied by a diverse array of musicians, including The Dirty Dozen Brass Band in New Orleans and Burnett Thompson in Washington, D.C. For footage of their journey and performances, visit:http://www.bigbridge.org/ROCKPILE/.

As the ROCKPILE website reminds us, “David Meltzer was raised in Brooklyn during the war years. He performed on radio and early TV on the Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour. He was exiled to L.A. at 16, and at 17 enrolled in an ongoing academy with artists Wallace Berman, George Herms, Robert Alexander, and Cameron. David migrated to San Francisco in 1957 for higher education with peers & maestros like Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, Jack Hirschman, and a cast of thousands all living extraordinary ordinary lives. His Beat Thing (La Alameda Press, 2004) won the Josephine Miles PEN Award, 2005. He was editor and interviewer for San Francisco Beat: Talking With The Poets (City Lights, 2001). With Steve Dickison, David co-edits Shuffle Boil, a magazine devoted to music in all its appearances & disappearances. 2005 saw the publication of David’s Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer by Viking/Penguin, a collection spanning over forty years of work. It paints a vivid portrait of Meltzer’s life as a poet, through poems taken from thirty of his previous books of poetry. With a versatile style and playful tone, Meltzer offers his unique vision of civilization with a range of juxtapositions from Jewish mysticism and everyday life to jazz and pop culture. His website is at Meltzerville.com.”

Michael Rothenberg and David Meltzer agreed to answer a few questions about their time on the road together.

CL: How was ROCKPILE conceived? What role did the Allen Ginsberg Trust play in putting the tour together?

MR: Terri Carrion should get the major credit for setting up ROCKPILE. David Meltzer and Terri and I were running around the country doing readings together so ROCKPILE formalized and expanded what we had already begun doing. David had been teaching at New College for like twenty-seven years, and when the school closed down he was out of a job. He needed something to get him out of the house. I was done working on the Whalen Collected and looking for something challenging to do. Terri was burned out working in a retail store, so we were all ready for a change. Terri and I heard about a grant that was available from the Creative Work Fund. Terri researched that and together we came up with the ROCKPILE concept. Terri put together an awesome proposal and we got the grant. The project name, ROCKPILE, came from an unpublished book that David had been working on for years about the music scene he was part of back in the ’60s. Though this project has nothing to do with that book it does obviously have something to do with poetry and music. And it was a dream come true to work with all these amazing musicians and go around the country to different cities and meet new people and talk about issues that mattered to us, as well as share a love of poetry. It seems that people have become incredibly isolated over the years and ROCKPILE was a way of opening up things. Life in the Bay Area can get very isolated and provincial.

The Allen Ginsberg Trust has always been a friend and supportive, but they weren’t involved in putting together the tour. They were our fiscal sponsors. You had to have a fiscal sponsor that was non-profit to qualify for a grant from the Creative Work Fund.

CL: Who booked the dates? Who found the musicians in each city?

MR: I booked all the dates and most of the musicians. That was exhausting. Some musicians, like Theo Saunders and Marty Ehrlich, had already worked with David, so they were naturally brought into the program. Theo hooked us up with John B. Williams in L.A. and Marty Ehrlich hooked us up with Lindsey Horner and Michael Stephans in N.Y.C. I had previously worked with Bob Malone, Johnny Lee Schell, and Joe Sublett writing songs; it was great to get together with them as a performer. Johnny hooked us up with drummer Debra Dobkin, who’s been touring with Richard Thompson, and Debra hooked us up with The Dirty Dozen Brass Band in New Orleans. Burnett Thompson came to us through multiple referrals. He was a revelation. The Thunderbird Orkestra was organized by Jeff Bryan, who published my book Unhurried Vision and Meltzer’s Beat Thing. So you get the idea: lots of talk to lots of musicians about what we wanted or thought we wanted. I spent a solid year, day and night, exploring venues and musicians, times, dates, and configurations of all of the above, to put the tour together.

CL: David, how did Michael present the concept of ROCKPILE? What was your contribution to the concept and/or planning of the events?

David Meltzer: The concept was gestating between us and Terri. It was Terri who was able to make sense of it to articulate a grant proposal to the Creative Work Fund. This was a potluck ping ponging of ideas and enthusiasms. Lots of heated and overheated phone calls.

CL: What have you learned from Michael? How would you characterize his work?

DM: The pleasure of watching him elevate his performance style. Watching/hearing him wheel and deal. His frenzied sweetness and deep loyalty. His work is ongoing and abundant, and like all of us, he needs more books, presence, and acceptance in the Wide Wide World of Poetry. I also must advocate for Terri Carrion's equal importance in all of this, not only her grunt work—uploading the blog, talking pictures, videoing—but also emerging as a sensational performer. Much joy all around.

CL: How did you two meet?

DM: Michael was a returning student—i.e., middle-aged—and entered the graduate Poetics program at New College of California. He felt more like a peer than a student. We did a lot of independent studies; he was in all my classes and always put a special spin and brilliance in his papers and presentations. Our friendship and collaborations have deepened over time. Over the past few years we've done many gigs in the Bay Area and elsewhere. I've noted how he's grown as a poet and performer.

CL: Can you speak specifically about how the delivery of the work was affected by the artists with whom you collaborated?

DM: Good question. As you know, any performance is never the same performance, it’s all contingent on interactions. The key is to listen and be heard. All the musicians we worked with brought their unique creative attention to working with us. Starting at our first gig at the Hammer Billy Wilder Auditorium in LA, to our grand finale in St. Louis. We were privileged to work with and learn from the musicians. As the official old fart—one who started doing poetry with jazz in l958—it was a profound re-learning, for which I thank the musicians.

MR: That’s a way complicated question. Let’s just say that the more time I spent with these musicians the more I learned how to listen to them. I couldn’t just run out on stage and read and expect some kind of background music to fill out the collaboration. I didn’t get with them to give me a soundtrack. Music for this kind of program isn’t some kind of vase to stick the flowers in—you enter another time zone on stage, and in that time zone it’s time to listen to everyone there playing with you, to find your place and groove as one of the instruments. And the better the collaborating musicians were at listening to us, the more we could work good things out. It is a very immediate and experiential collaboration. The performance is created at the time of the performance itself, not on paper somewhere.

CL: Did any of the collaborations lead you to a different perspective on the piece you performed?

MR: Sure, everything changed in the collaboration. The biggest problem with poetry readings these day is that most poetry readers have a preconceived idea about how they think a poem sounds, or what a poem means, and how they think it should be read. So they go out and read with some kind of preconceived melody and rhythm and tone that most of the time has nothing to do with the actual poem, or voice of the poem, or voice of the poet. It is totally inappropriate. I don’t think all kinds of poets should sound the same when they read a poem, but they mostly do these days. Not necessarily because they write the same but because they imitate each other’s performance style. It’s monotonous. I don’t get that.

Once the poem leaves the page it has a life of its own. You have to learn it over and over again, at each performance, word for word, note for note. The words tell you what is being said. Not some idea of the words. Each time is new. Perspectives, moods, how you see and think about a poem, changes from day to day. And musicians change from day to day. Different musicians, or the same musicians, in different moods. So you have to be open to that.

I never imagined poems like “Angels” and ”The Jet” to be “entertaining.” In fact, I thought that if a poem was too “entertaining” then it was probably superficial. But as I got out there and started to work with musicians I got a different take on things. I learned more how to have fun and improvise. That poetry is a celebration. I went along with my collaborators, musicians and audience, to learn how a work could, on a given day, be performed.

CL: Please share one or two highlights from the tour. What images or experiences stay with you?

DM: Performing "Brother" in duo with baritone saxophonist Roger Lewis of The Dirty Dozen Brass Band in New Orleans. The trio in Buffalo—whose names I don't have at hand—bass, drum, tenor sax. Also, that night, Terri came into her own as a performer.

MR: There were so many highlights that I can’t begin to say. I lost my mind in L.A. freaking out because I didn’t think the collaboration would work and then we got to the Hammer and it was so beautiful, I didn’t think we needed to go any further on the tour—it couldn’t get better. When we got to New Orleans I saw the audience dance to David’s “Red Shoes.” The groove created by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band was so compelling, and Meltzer was so on the money, that you couldn’t help dancing. Imagine, dancing to a poetry reading! It was sublime. In D.C. with Burnett Thompson, man, we had no rehearsal at all and Burnett set up a mind-blowing collaboration, brought on this angelic vocalist who opened and closed the show, created this great vocal contrast to our voices, and Joseph Cunliffe soared on multi-reed. Burnett had the whole thing magically improvised. I thought I died and gone to heaven. I swear I got into some bliss state that lasted for days. Then Bob Malone seemed to be everywhere—Chicago, St. Louis—and he shook the audience out of any kind of too serious mood with some rollicking, rocking Professor Long Hair, Dr. John, Jerry Lee Lewis kind of piano playing and shattered the whole idea of the “too serious poetry reading.” What a relief! Then there were the ribs at Dreamland. Meltzer denies it but he went back for seconds, but Terri stopped him because he is mostly a fishetarian and it was 10 am. She didn’t want him to hurt himself. There were too many highlights. Being on the road with David and Terri for two months in itself was a highlight. You could break that down!

CL: Did you write while on tour? How does being in transit affect the way that you write?

MR: Writing on this tour was difficult. My objective was to write for the ROCKPILE blog. That was our mission based on the grant and promise to friends who wanted to follow us on our journey. But we drove thousands of miles, planning ahead for PA, piano, venues, musicians, checking in and checking out of motels, moving baggage, running off to gatherings, seminars, and so forth—there was little time or mind space for writing. I have always liked writing on the move but there was just so much to do. By the time we got to N.Y.C. we had fallen behind on our “daily” blogging. I have never been a straight-out blogger type, neither is Meltzer. I did what I could to adapt to what I thought was a blog form. Terri had to do all the filming and uploading of film, videos, photos, and so forth so she rarely took up the pen. I didn’t finish with my blog entries until about a month after we got back home.

DM: I watched way too much TV in the motel rooms, especially those with huge flat screens. I'm not hooked up at home, just watch DVDs. Wrote fragmentary blahgs. Was getting adjusted to the restrictive freedom of a new iBook. The road throws routine out the window. My disciplined "writerly" habits of solitary were suddenly distracted by constantly shifting motel/hotel rooms. It was impossible for me to get in regular writing patterns and to work on three projects in progress.

CL: How much rehearsal time did you have with the musicians? What did you learn from working with them?

MR: Most of the time we had no rehearsals. Time and money didn’t allow it. It wasn’t really about rehearsals, though, it was about meeting and getting to know each other artistically. We didn’t score stuff out. We got some grooves down and sometimes gave the musicians poems so they could look them over. But mostly nobody had time to think about anything. A few cues, like hey, I want blues groove. Or I want this to rock. Or just start playing, I’ll jump in. We had a couple hours with The Dirty Dozen, the LA Band, and Thunderbird Poetry Orkestra, we did work with Malone in S.F. in the pre-ramble at Bird & Beckett, but mostly it was a case of show up, cross your fingers, and jump! I learned that no matter what you’ve got planned, what you think you know, you don’t know anything. It’s all one big mystery. Trust yourself, trust the musicians, let the moment speak to you and take it from there.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010