No.18 - November 2017
The Great Conversation
My wife and I sometimes refer to one of her many superpowers as TDR, which stands for “Total Dessert Recall.” She has an uncanny ability to remember details of memorable confections from many years past. At a restaurant, she’ll look up from her dessert and say something like “This tastes a little bit like that blackberry tart we had at Cape Cod that time, doesn’t it?” I usually draw a blank: what time at Cape Cod?
I suppose one of my superpowers, much less savory, is remembering details about many if not all the books on my shelves: who recommended or gave it to me; where we were living when I first read it; at which bookstore that particular copy of the book was purchased, sometimes down to the exact shelf; and even who was with me at the time, often. My books talk to me, beyond what the words say. One of my oldest poetry pals, Joe Donahue, gave me a library discard of Philip Larkin’s classic collection The Whitsun Weddings over forty years ago. I did not love Larkin’s work at the time, but at his prompting I soon did, and every time I open that volume I think of our long friendship.
Individual poems, too. Frequently the memory involves hearing a poem read aloud. D.H. Lawrence’s great ode, “Snake,” will forever call up in my mind an afternoon in our apartment in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1977, when my friend Fran Quinn, amazed that I did not know the poem, recited the whole thing aloud from memory while sitting on our sofa. My grad school professor Joe Langland did the same thing with Frost’s late masterpiece “Directive” while on a hike in Quabbin Reservoir, a New England landscape perfectly reflecting Frost’s theme of lost communities of the imagination. I fell in love with Whitman’s “Song of Myself” after hearing Galway Kinnell give a reading entirely from that great work—again, in Worcester MA in the late 1970s. Likewise, Michael Harper at a reading in 1981 read Robert Hayden’s “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves” aloud to start a reading, and my love of Hayden’s work was cemented. Another old friend, Mary Fell, happens to be a great reader aloud, and hearing her recite poems by Thomas McGrath initiated my love of his work, among others.
Books and individual poems talk to each other, too, obviously. There’s a wonderful anthology titled Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems, edited by Kurt Brown and Harold Schecter. The book’s premise is that poets are always, to some degree, conversing with earlier poems and poets as they compose their own works; the book gathers some famous responses (such as Walter Ralegh’s reply to Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”) as well as many lesser-known examples. I think that this process is one of the things I love most about writing poetry. Even if my own poems will never rival Shakespeare’s or Dickinson’s or Frost’s in fame or quality, I am in my own small way in dialogue with those poets (and others) every time I lift my pen. Not only do I pick up tricks of the trade and poetic prompts from great poets of the past, but also the memory of specific poems and lines helps deepen my own thinking. Conversing in this way with Williams or Moore and the rest improves not just the craft of my poems but the quality of my thinking, and thus my life.
I’ll conclude with a small example of the sort of process I’m talking about. It involves a book which my Total Book Recall tells me I picked up at the Isaiah Thomas used bookstore in Worcester, MA in 1975. And a poem I first read in the Poetry Room at Sanborn House at Dartmouth College in 1972 or 1973 when I was first exploring contemporary poetry seriously. It is a story of poets conversing with each other over vast distances and a thousand years, and one young poet listening in to the conversation, like an eavesdropper on an old-fashioned party line telephone.
I fell in love with James Wright's poems in that Poetry Room, especially his 1963 collection The Branch Will Not Break, which contains this lovely and haunting lyric that I still love more than four decades later:
As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter, I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor
And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?
-- Written A.D. 819
Po Chü-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.
You made it, I guess,
By dark.
But it is 1960, it is almost spring again,
And the tall rocks of Minneapolis
Build me my own black twilight
Of bamboo ropes and waters.
Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?
--James Wright. Collected Poems. Wesleyan UP, 1971.
That final image of the frayed rope still gives me a shiver. I love Wright’s honesty and willingness to question the value of his life’s work (“What’s the use?”) even as he pays homage to one of his masters and, paradoxically, underscores the value of poetry even as he questions it. The poem is full of other marvelous touches, my favorite perhaps being his update of the classic ubi sunt motif, here updated to contemporary America. Years later, while living for three decades myself in the Midwest, I found these lines only growing in power:
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Furthermore, Wright’s work, along with that of poets such as Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, and other contemporaries I was discovering in that period, often led me backward in this way, deeper into the tradition. As a poetry-mad young man, I was eager to learn about the influences on my poetic heroes, and so I paid close attention to even casual references to other, older poets.
Thus is was that I found myself standing before the poetry shelf at Isaiah Thomas Used Bookstore in Worcester, which happened to be right next door to our apartment building (I still can’t believe my luck)—and my eye was caught by a large, orange-colored hardback book containing Arthur Waley's influential and still-wonderful translations of classical Chinese poetry. I felt a sharp thrill when I realized I was holding in my hand a copy of the very edition of this book, published in 1941, that Wright must have been reading in the early 1960s. I brought it home and have carried it faithfully, home to home, ever since. Best $4.50 I ever spent!
And that is how I discovered the great Tang poet Po Chü-I (Bai Juyi in the newer spelling that neither Wright nor I favor). Even after all these years, it feels like a real gift that Wright left me. Here’s the poem Wright quotes, in Waley’s translation. (All the notes are Waley’s):
I suppose one of my superpowers, much less savory, is remembering details about many if not all the books on my shelves: who recommended or gave it to me; where we were living when I first read it; at which bookstore that particular copy of the book was purchased, sometimes down to the exact shelf; and even who was with me at the time, often. My books talk to me, beyond what the words say. One of my oldest poetry pals, Joe Donahue, gave me a library discard of Philip Larkin’s classic collection The Whitsun Weddings over forty years ago. I did not love Larkin’s work at the time, but at his prompting I soon did, and every time I open that volume I think of our long friendship.
Individual poems, too. Frequently the memory involves hearing a poem read aloud. D.H. Lawrence’s great ode, “Snake,” will forever call up in my mind an afternoon in our apartment in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1977, when my friend Fran Quinn, amazed that I did not know the poem, recited the whole thing aloud from memory while sitting on our sofa. My grad school professor Joe Langland did the same thing with Frost’s late masterpiece “Directive” while on a hike in Quabbin Reservoir, a New England landscape perfectly reflecting Frost’s theme of lost communities of the imagination. I fell in love with Whitman’s “Song of Myself” after hearing Galway Kinnell give a reading entirely from that great work—again, in Worcester MA in the late 1970s. Likewise, Michael Harper at a reading in 1981 read Robert Hayden’s “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves” aloud to start a reading, and my love of Hayden’s work was cemented. Another old friend, Mary Fell, happens to be a great reader aloud, and hearing her recite poems by Thomas McGrath initiated my love of his work, among others.
Books and individual poems talk to each other, too, obviously. There’s a wonderful anthology titled Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems, edited by Kurt Brown and Harold Schecter. The book’s premise is that poets are always, to some degree, conversing with earlier poems and poets as they compose their own works; the book gathers some famous responses (such as Walter Ralegh’s reply to Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”) as well as many lesser-known examples. I think that this process is one of the things I love most about writing poetry. Even if my own poems will never rival Shakespeare’s or Dickinson’s or Frost’s in fame or quality, I am in my own small way in dialogue with those poets (and others) every time I lift my pen. Not only do I pick up tricks of the trade and poetic prompts from great poets of the past, but also the memory of specific poems and lines helps deepen my own thinking. Conversing in this way with Williams or Moore and the rest improves not just the craft of my poems but the quality of my thinking, and thus my life.
I’ll conclude with a small example of the sort of process I’m talking about. It involves a book which my Total Book Recall tells me I picked up at the Isaiah Thomas used bookstore in Worcester, MA in 1975. And a poem I first read in the Poetry Room at Sanborn House at Dartmouth College in 1972 or 1973 when I was first exploring contemporary poetry seriously. It is a story of poets conversing with each other over vast distances and a thousand years, and one young poet listening in to the conversation, like an eavesdropper on an old-fashioned party line telephone.
I fell in love with James Wright's poems in that Poetry Room, especially his 1963 collection The Branch Will Not Break, which contains this lovely and haunting lyric that I still love more than four decades later:
As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter, I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor
And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?
-- Written A.D. 819
Po Chü-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.
You made it, I guess,
By dark.
But it is 1960, it is almost spring again,
And the tall rocks of Minneapolis
Build me my own black twilight
Of bamboo ropes and waters.
Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?
--James Wright. Collected Poems. Wesleyan UP, 1971.
That final image of the frayed rope still gives me a shiver. I love Wright’s honesty and willingness to question the value of his life’s work (“What’s the use?”) even as he pays homage to one of his masters and, paradoxically, underscores the value of poetry even as he questions it. The poem is full of other marvelous touches, my favorite perhaps being his update of the classic ubi sunt motif, here updated to contemporary America. Years later, while living for three decades myself in the Midwest, I found these lines only growing in power:
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Furthermore, Wright’s work, along with that of poets such as Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, and other contemporaries I was discovering in that period, often led me backward in this way, deeper into the tradition. As a poetry-mad young man, I was eager to learn about the influences on my poetic heroes, and so I paid close attention to even casual references to other, older poets.
Thus is was that I found myself standing before the poetry shelf at Isaiah Thomas Used Bookstore in Worcester, which happened to be right next door to our apartment building (I still can’t believe my luck)—and my eye was caught by a large, orange-colored hardback book containing Arthur Waley's influential and still-wonderful translations of classical Chinese poetry. I felt a sharp thrill when I realized I was holding in my hand a copy of the very edition of this book, published in 1941, that Wright must have been reading in the early 1960s. I brought it home and have carried it faithfully, home to home, ever since. Best $4.50 I ever spent!
And that is how I discovered the great Tang poet Po Chü-I (Bai Juyi in the newer spelling that neither Wright nor I favor). Even after all these years, it feels like a real gift that Wright left me. Here’s the poem Wright quotes, in Waley’s translation. (All the notes are Waley’s):
|
Alarm at First Entering the Yang-Tze Gorges
(Written in A.D. 818, when he was being towed up the rapids to Chung-chou.) Above, a mountain ten thousand feet high; Below, a river a thousand fathoms deep. A strip of sky, walled by cliffs of stone; Wide enough for the passage of a single reed.[1] At Qutang a straight left yawns; At Yanyu island block the stream. Long before night the walls are black with dusk; Without wind white waves rise. The big rocks are like a flat sword; The little rocks resemble ivory tusks. We are stuck fast and cannot move a step. How much the less, three hundred miles? [2] Frail and slender, the twisted-bamboo rope; Weak, the treacherous hold of the punters' feet. A single slip--the whole convoy lost; And my life hangs on this thread! I have heard a saying 'He that has an upright heart Shall walk scatheless through the lands of Man and Mo.'[3] How can I believe that since the world began In every shipwreck none have drowned but rogues And how can I, born in evil days[4] And fresh from failure,[5] ask a kindness of Fate? Often I fear that these un-talented limbs Will be laid at last in an un-named grave! -- Po Chü-I (722-846). Trans. Arthur Waley. Translations from the Chinese. Alfred A. Knopf, 1941. ----------------------------------- [1] See Odes, v. 7. [2] The distance to Chung-chou. [3] Dangerous savages. [4] Of civil war. [5] Alluding to his renewed banishment. |
I confess to some delight when I realized that Wright got the date of Po Chü-i's poem wrong by a year, but the deeper pleasure here, of course, is seeing a wonderful poet in dialogue with an ancient master, a conversation spanning centuries and drawing links between very different cultures. It’s a pleasure that doesn’t dim with the years, and one I’ve spent my adult life seeking in bookstores and libraries across this country. Not to mention in countless conversations with other poets and in journals like the one you’re now reading.
© 2017 David Graham