Bio Note:
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, author of the epochal “Babi Yar,” claimed “A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote”. I must ask myself what is important about my life beside my poems? There are times and places and people, and various interests of course, that are subjects of, or enter into the poems, but the poems themselves are tracings of a spiritual ontogeny, and that I suppose, is as close as I may come to my own internal life, especially now, since the body has nearly become the book. There are intensely lyrical poems that reveal a quiddity I identify as my own; it is what might be taken as autobiography; something lived and living; an ensemble of nonmaterial realities; nuances of the sublime. For example, I cannot dissociate myself from what is perhaps one of the most significant metaphysical poems of the 20th century, Snodgrass’s “Monet: 'Les Nymphéas',” a poem I had taught in colloquia for decades before I finally wrote its author noting its perfections which engendered an epistolary exchange into the poet’s final years. Let me offer the poem here, knowing it has absorbed me as much as I have absorbed it. The sensibilities of the poem and my own have become consubstantial, a word I first learned in my early education from Dominican nuns. The sense of divine Mystery, faith in the universe, the importance of gratitude over despair, the reality of eternal Forms, the immortality of ‘selves’; that charity heals grief, and that charity is character; that character is more important than intelligence, that genius is nothing without humility, all I have found in this single poem, and each notion descended directly from a few pages of the Phaedo written 400 years before the good sisters’ savior was born, and laid the foundation of their beliefs. It is the poetry of supreme imagination, of transcendence over the brokenness and losses of this world. If at all interested, other materially-related autobiographical information may be found at www.michaelgessner.com, at Poets & Writers, or at Poetry Foundation. |
Monet: “Les Nymphéas”
by W. D. Snodgrass
The eyelids glowing, some chill morning.
O world half-known through opening, twilit lids
Before the vague face clenches into light;
O universal waters like a cloud,
Like those first clouds of half-created matter;
O all things rising, rising like the fumes
From waters falling, O forever falling;
Infinite, the skeletal shells that fall, relinquished,
The snowsoft sift of the diatoms, like selves
Downdrifting age upon age through milky oceans;
O slow downdrifting of the atoms;
O island nebulae and O the nebulous islands
Wandering these mists like falsefires, which are true,
Bobbing like milkweed, like warm lanterns bobbing
Through the snowfilled windless air, blinking and passing
As we pass into the memory of women
Who are passing. Within those depths
What ravening? What devouring rage?
How shall our living know its ends of yielding?
These things have taken me as the mouth an orange—
That acrid sweet juice entering every cell;
And I am shared out. I become these things:
These lilies, if these things are water lilies
Which are dancers growing dim across no floor;
These mayflies; whirled dust orbiting in the sun;
This blossoming diffused as rushlights; galactic vapors;
Fluorescence into which we pass and penetrate;
O soft as the thighs of women;
O radiance, into which I go on dying ...