A Hundred Himalayas is dedicated, in some sense, to reconsidering the way in which we respond to poetry, too many of us having been erroneously instructed by non-poets to think of a poem as above all a vehicle for "ideas."
A Hundred Himalayas is available from many sources, but here is a link to its listing on amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Himalayas-Literature-Writers-Writing/dp/0472051881/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373038681&sr=1-4&keywords=a+hundred+himalayas
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Mercy, Mercy, Mercy: The Poet’s Awkwardness
This commentary,*
whatever its worth, will, I promise, at least be honest, and to that extent a
bit confessional. So I begin by meditating on why I felt a small knot in my
stomach when I heard you expected to hear a craft talk. I’ve spoken, if
anything, too much in public. Why, then, this fit of nerves, however slight?
Well, yes,
I’ve talked my share about the literary life, but have tended to shy away from
that word “craft.” My unease, it
occurs to me, may be derived from a time when I was your age or younger, when
my college offered no writing courses. Like most old-style academics, my professors preferred their
poets dead; they’d have scoffed at communal discussion of the poet’s craft. Despite
the career path I chose, which often leads me exactly to such conversation, maybe
I still carry a trace of their attitudes. Indeed, how could I not, however much
I’ve repressed or rejected that disposition?
In any
case, I was never versed in the patois I associate with that word craft, and am hardly more at home with
it even now. I could speak a lot more authoritatively on managing a New England
woodlot or on how to train pointing dogs or what goes into editing a literary
journal. I have lived for poetry, yes, but not exclusively.
I don’t for
a moment brag about all this. It would be absurd to bash the very creative
writing courses I’ve taught for so long, and with such pleasure. As a teacher,
I don’t think I did any harm in the class room, for all that I don’t speak MFA
very well. I also have eclectic tastes, more or less equally valuing, say, the
best of Anthony Hecht and of Allen Ginsberg. In light of such latitude in my
reader’s personality, as instructor I prefer to look at student poems in what I
construe to be their own imaginative terms, not mine. I have no brighter
approach to pedagogy than this: let me see your poem; perhaps I can help you to
get out of your own way, allowing the poem to be what it wants to be. On which more later.
Given this mix of strength and undeniable weakness that I bring to
the table, I’m necessarily a little skeptical about certain craft discussions
I’ve read or heard, too often presenting the speaker’s own practices as the
correct ones, trivializing or attacking others. I hope not to do the same. The
world would be the better for a little more humility than one notices in most
quarters, literary and otherwise.
In brief, I’m suspicious of talks or essays or books that say,
fundamentally, Here’s How You Do It. Forty years ago, nervous as a cat about teaching my first
creative writing course, I sought help from a volume called How to Write Fiction or something to
that effect. Oddly, I was not distracted by the fact that the author’s own
fiction had never been much published: at least I for one had never heard of
any at that time, as I haven’t since.
When I tried to apply that book’s admonitions to my students’
work, I rarely found it helpful. I quickly saw, of course, that how you do it and how I do it, and how he or she do it are inevitably different. I don’t to
my knowledge even share genes with anyone in this room, let alone other things
that influence our respective views of the world, so if I’m expected to tell
anyone how to do it today, I will disappoint.
If I touch at some length on how I do it, that’s only because I hope sharing my process may stir something
in your own minds; if it does, that will be something you’ll have to use in
your own way. I scarcely imagine you’ll drop everything to follow me down my
enlightened path, which is in fact not much enlightened anyhow. Indeed, I feel awkward
as a writer most of the time, just as I often feel awkward as a man, one
speaking to you now in some diffidence. In fact, for me poetry, more than other
genres I’ve dabbled in, is a crucial instrument for working with that very awkwardness.
I’ve often claimed, indeed, that that’s largely what poetry is for. If writing poems affords me a way of grappling with my
awkwardness, in the process abating it some, I won’t really care much about
reputation, prizes, and other trappings of a “successful” career. That may
sound disingenuous, but it’s true.
Back, briefly, to the autobiographical trail I was trotting a few
moments ago. I came to a sustained writing habit very late. Well north of 35
when I started with real dedication, I was 40 when my first collection
appeared. Why should all that have been? Why hadn’t I gone on to a writing
program like this one?
Truth is, even if I’d had enough on hand to present a portfolio, as
I didn’t, I wouldn’t have found a tenth as many such programs in the middle
sixties as now, a fact I mention neutrally, by the way. And even if I’d thought
of being a writer back in my twenties, I’d never have dreamed of applying to
any of the few available institutions, to Iowa, say, or Stanford.
You see, I had this peculiar idea that writers knew some sort of
secret, and that they weren’t about to share it with me. The ones who had that
secret were the few I knew who did go on to MFA programs. Without access to their cabalistic
knowledge, I‘d soon be headed either to Viet Nam or to graduate training.
Unlike my beloved roommate, who fell in that war, I chose school.
After my graduate years, and after twice as much time teaching
conventional literature courses, indeed well after the average laboratory rat
would have found it, I finally understood what the secret was: if you want to
be a writer, you have to, like, write.
In my defense, my own training as a scholar may have blinded me to
this self-evident simplism. Strange to say, most of my teachers, brilliant as certain
ones were, had a strikingly adolescent view of what makes a poet. They appeared
to believe that he or just walks out one day, gets struck by lightning or the
finger of God or whatever -- and PRESTO: here’s William Blake!
Small wonder I knew flat nothing about what being a writer meant.
I had the fancy Ph.D., and in pursuit of it had read a whole lot of poetry,
including a bit by the stars of that time. I could therefore have spun a pretty
spiffy interpretation of poems by
Lowell, Berryman, or Plath, but of course that intellectual gambit wouldn’t have
helped me start on my own writing. I hadn’t discovered, to put matters tersely,
how I might read poetry as a poet myself. I couldn’t yet read poetic
composition, so to speak, from within.
Now I don’t know which was chicken and which egg. Did I learn to
read as a writer by writing, or did I learn to write by learning to read in a
new way? It scarcely matters here.
I’ll be speaking only of my own tendencies from here on. As I’ve already indicated, there are
poets I love, even idolize, who do things far differently than I do. And of course there always have been: I
think notably of Alexander Pope, who writes what he specifically calls essays
in verse: the Essay on Man, the Essay on Criticism, and so on. But I’m
not about to be the Pope of poetry, or of anything else. My rational,
essayistic brain, a pretty under-developed organ anyhow, won’t prevail in my
take on the art. For me, at leasr,
poetry has become another way of knowing,
in which black can be black but can also be white, though that is probably an
overstatement and is surely a poetical figure.
In any case, how do we
know in lyric? Time for a touch of
that confessional mode: as I set out to discover what I may know, I must first
become, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “an ignorant man again.” I must proceed in
such ignorance until the poem reveals the knowledge I’ve alluded to. But for fear that all this sound too
dreadfully solipsistic, let me say that dealings with other people are as likely to spur me as any
precious little frisson of private
emotion. I must interact with family members, friends, community members, and
people who never consider poetry at all. Loggers and farmers, for example: I think we poets need to have commerce
with such folk, and/or their urban counterparts, lest we believe that everyone
shares our fascinations, and so proceed to write work based on this misprision.
If there’s any danger at all in Creeping MFAism, it may be that we too often
preach to our choirs. Yet that’s a different subject altogether, and I should
try and move on in a linear, focused way.
I want for
a moment to remember a certain question recently asked of me in connection with
an anthology scheme: “How has music influenced your writing?” I’ve offered my
response in another place as best I can, and rather than repeating it here,
I’ll instead recite a poem, also recent.
It’s one
that must have begun as I listened to a new-to-me c.d. called Know What I Mean? featuring Cannonball Adderley. (I’ve
been fan of Cannonball and his
cornetist brother Nat since the sixties.) After just a few bars I suddenly
thought of the first time of several that I heard Cannonball in live
performance. That was at a club in Philadelphia called Pep’s Musical Bar, which
in those days was owned by basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain. All this must
have been in February, 1965, because just at that moment Dr. King and his
followers were being brutalized in Selma, Alabama. I had worked at a camp for
inner city kids in the north end of Philadelphia for four preceding summers,
and was back for a visit.
As I reminisced
on that particular time in my life and the nation’s, in due course I came up
with the following:
Mercy, Mercy, Mercy:
The Stilt, some called him. Or
the Big Dipper.
Chamberlain was the man, for
whom
they changed the rules,
because one night
he scored 100 points in a
game.
And Wilt was the owner of Pep’s
Café.
Broad and South,
Philadelphia,
1965, where the great
Cannonball Adderley band of
the time,
with Cannon himself on alto,
his brother
Nat on cornet, Joe Zawinul
on keyboard, Yusef Lateef on
tenor,
Sam Jones on bass and Louis
Hayes, drums --
that Adderley band was
turning out
the whole damned place, it
was standing room only,
and there I was standing in a
jam-packed aisle
between bar and booths, in
love with sound.
How precise it is, the way I
remember
that Yusef had launched into Gemini
when I felt the tap on my
shoulder and turned
and looked straight into the
middle button
of a splash-weave jacket and
heard a voice say
from way up there, Pardon
me, white man.
What else on earth would I do
but pardon?
I felt that I
was the one who needed
pardon, not because I felt
fear,
as I might have, the man
being more than tall,
the man being wide as a truck
as well,
which you couldn’t tell on
television --
it wasn’t fear, but rather
the utter
incapacity, my own
or anyone else’s, to take
that night
and the muted light and the
mellow liquor
feeling and to blow every bit
of all that
out into air in one big
breath,
so the breath would somehow
change the world
that I knew surrounded
everybody.
Dr. King was trying to change
it
in spite of frothing dogs and
cops.
You watched it every day on
t.v.
The clubs. The cattle prods.
Perhaps,
though I was just 22, this
was
my first real understanding
of how
goodwill can count for nothing
and magic
thinking will buy you at best
another
beer if you can make your way
-- pardon me, pardon me, pardon me, pardon me --
past those suave black bodies
and up to the bar
and make yourself heard over
harmonies
and tumbles down into
dissonance
and back of the white-hot
reeds and brass,
above the drums, above the pulsing
wrenching chords that Joe
broke into
next on Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.
What are the
ingredients that went into this poem’s “knowledge,” as in my vanity I name it? First off, and of course unknown to the
reader, I’d heard that new c.d., though the sidemen are different from the ones
referred to in the poem. But there
was surely other hidden stuff too, which no reader could possibly know. Every
poem, I believe, has its hidden allegory in addition to its overt material, so
that none is ever entirely understandable, even to its author.
I also believe
that every poem has its own formal
instincts. I discovered that my first, rushed, more or less free-verse draft
ended up being 54 lines long. That allowed me to try dividing it into six
stanzas of nine lines; then nine stanzas of six lines. When neither worked for
me, I cut one line from the whole and generated four stanzas of thirteen lines
with a final one-line stanza that came down hard on the title of the tune. (I may well, as so often, have been fooling
around with this sort of thing to compensate my otherwise hopeless relation to
mathematics.)
Now
resorting to mere addition, subtraction and division probably sounds mechanical
as can be, and in some sense it doubtless is; yet for me it’s also liberating, because
such a strategy distracts me from thematic over-management. The fiddling with
line-count set me loose to play with my materials,
which for a poet are words and lines and stanzas, just as for the musician
they’re notes, phrases, chord structures, scales. If I can lose myself to the
almost physical properties of language, I find, the thematic issues will take
care of themselves.
As I
reflected on the six-line stanza, on the nine, and ultimately on the thirteen, for
example, my effort (and in two of the three tries my failure) to make each one
not only a component of the whole but also a more or less self-contained unit,
allowed certain thematic possibilities to sneak
up on me. I did not have to will
them into existence. If meaning, to call it that, did come, it did so unbidden.
I subordinated my ego to the poem, which allowed it to be what it wanted to be.
As I said
earlier, my goal as teacher is to help my students do the same, which means
they must learn to pick up on the clues that their own words and forms seem
spontaneously to plant in beginning drafts. Here, the title of the tune I used
as the last line, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,”
simply leapt in at the close; that closing line is, I think, the one component
of the poem that never changed. “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” was not the tune that
played just after Wilt tapped me on the shoulder, but it certainly should have
been, as the other parts of the poem suddenly made clear.
Before I started,
my will may have wanted this poem to evoke transport by music, but it seems the
poem itself was looking for something else: when the tune’s title dropped into
so crucial a part of the draft, it made me recognize the part of
guilt in what I’d thought to be my
goodwill that evening. Mercy seemed
to have something to do with the word pardon
in Chamberlain’s “Pardon me,”
though the politeness of his request was more than a little sarcastic. There
was something about me that needed pardon.
Maybe deep down, far as I may have been from some frothing white supremacist, I
understood myself as at least tangentially implicated in that disgrace down in
Selma. I was, after all, an
American of European stock.
And finally,
straightforward as it may appear, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” being a 4/4 tune, I decided to write my poem in tetrameter,
another choice that pulled me away from worrying too greatly about so-called
theme. I wanted more to enact the
evening, you see, than to comment on it, at least in an overt way.
That moment
in Pep’s; that eye-blink encounter with Big Wilt; that rendition of “Mercy,
Mercy, Mercy,” a tune I hadn’t yet heard from that band or any -- all of this
got tied up in memory with the violence confronted by civil rights activists around
the country in that era. It’s at least possible it got tied up too with the
fact that Joe Zawinul, the featured musician and the author of this particular
song, was the only white musician in the quintet. That is, he’d found entrée to a world which I revered, but
which -- however much I tried to tell
myself otherwise -- remained pretty opaque to a young Ivy
Leaguer like me. To recall my
words from earlier on: the profound sense of my own awkwardness, then and much later,
surged back into my consciousness.
On a
lighter but related note, everything I’ve said has something to do with poetry
as play, and in several senses of
that term: it is play in the sense of drama;
it is also play in the sense of playing around with one’s materials, like
children in a sandbox -- no shame in that; and it may be play in more or less
the same sense we use the word when we speak of a musician’s performance.
Where can
all this play take us? To discover where, either as readers or as writers, is
at the heart of the excitement – I can’t call it less -- that this art has
always stirred in my own being, as I hope it may in yours.
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