Dear Tony,
“I too dislike it,” wrote Marianne Moore famously of poetry, echoing, at least for once, the sentiment of millions. So many people find poetry boring, baffling, beyond them. The Los Angeles Times doesn’t even review it any more. Here at Slate, this may be the only “Book Club” focusing on poetry all year. True, poetry is often “difficult”–but so is a lot of prose with quite a large readership, and I don’t mean famous unread best sellers like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which people, I’m persuaded, only buy as gifts for other people, who probably re-wrap it and pass it on as soon as they can–the literary equivalent of fruitcake. I mean books with real fans, like Ulysses or JR or the works of David Foster Wallace and his many acolytes. Lots of prose is challenging, requires special knowledge and frequent recourse to the dictionary, takes energy and patience to get into, and so on, but you don’t often hear people dismissing whole varieties of prose with a shrug: “Fiction’s just too much for me, the characters aren’t even real!” “History–so dull!”
I think part of the problem is that in school, which is where most people are first introduced to poetry, it is often presented as a complicated way of expressing a cliché. The aspects of a poem that give it its depth, its charm, its music, its however many layers of ambiguity, its energy, its wit, its memorability are relentlessly stripped away to reveal The Meaning, or The Theme, which is usually indistinguishable from The Moral. By the time it’s been pigeonholed, it’s one very dead bird. Once, after I gave a reading at a university, a student came up and asked me if a particular poem “meant” thus-and-so. I didn’t really understand what she was talking about, because she was speaking in teen-ager-ese, so I said, well, actually, I was thinking of something more like the way you might feel when this-and-that. Oh, she said, brightening, her pencil poised over her notebook, then it’s a carpe diem poem! Sure, right, whatever. No! If all I’d wanted to say was carpe diem why would I go to all the trouble of talking about winter, and beaches, and sea grass and New Jersey, arranging sounds and line breaks, choosing this word rather than that and all the rest of it? I’d just scribble, “Don’t delay/ Have a nice day!” And break for lunch.
Still, there are many times I read poetry with that Marianne Moore-ish sinking feeling also, when a poem does indeed seem to be a needlessly elaborate and fussy and falsely elevated way of saying something pretty ordinary, or even an ordinary way of saying something ordinary, but made to look intense and deeply felt by being laid out as poetry. (An interesting exercise with free verse is to write it out as a block of prose and see if the language retains any of the pulse or tension or pacing that is suggested by line breaks and stanza breaks.) When I started reading poetry as a child, I loved it for the words and the music and the weird chill I got when I said certain poems out loud. I still like Auden’s definition of poetry as “memorable speech.” I’d rather not understand a poem than not remember a poem. Which is lucky for me, because often, even today, I find a lot of poems mysterious.
Stanley Kunitz, as you say, offers in his Collected Poems a kind of personal trek through the styles of the century. (I studied with him for a semester at Columbia in the l970s, when he was already an old man.) He is very skilled; he’s read a lot; he has ongoing interests–painting, folk art, gardening, Jewishness, Russian literature (there are some excellent loose translations from Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam). And yet I often felt that his poems lacked energy and bite–the early ones in particular had a heightened diction and an abstractness that can sound rather fruity today ” O Sion of my heart, /the milk of love were charitable now.” Still, there are some lovely moments in these early poems:
The early violets we saw together,
Lifting their delicate swift heads
As if to dip them in the water, now wither,
Arching no more like thoroughbreds.
(“Approach of Autumn”)
Maybe “swift heads” is a little overemphatic and “poetic”–but I don’t think anyone has ever noticed in print a similarity between violets and horses before. That’s the “wit” you said you valued in poetry–the violent yoking together of dissimilar things. The violets are like the necks and heads of thoroughbreds in their nodding, graceful shape and like horses they pass swiftly, in time rather than space–but they are unlike them in that they are small, tidy sweet-smelling flowers and horses are huge, sweaty, clomping animals with big yellow teeth. It’s a little strained (especially if you’ve ever ridden a horse–they don’t seem very violetlike when you’re trying desperately to stay on top of one), but also odd and exciting. You feel Kunitz really looked at those flowers and saw something new in them.
There aren’t enough moments like that for me in Kunitz–moments where the language and imagery carry the poem. Mostly, after the first books of mostly rhymed, rather hermetic lyrics, the interest comes from the story or some often quite interesting and gracefully conveyed information–about the folk art commemorated in “Words for the Unknown Makers,” for example, or the beached whale in “The Wellfleet Whale.” Sometimes I thought that nothing would be lost if the “idea behind the poem” had been written as prose–a memoir, instead of the autobiographical poems about growing up fatherless in Worcester, with the overworked, frustrated, angry mother; the sisters in their middy blouses; the sexy German housemaid with whom he played hooky at the movies and who ran off with a married neighbor and sent a postcard from Dresden after the war inscribed with the single word “Liebe.” With Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, Roethke, and other autobiographically oriented poets, you remember the words–even if the poems aren’t very good, sometimes, they are still made of words, not sentiments or thoughts. With Kunitz’s personal poems you remember the anecdote. On the other hand, if Kunitz had moved over into prose, then we would not have “The Portrait,” which for me, as for you, is the standout poem in the volume:
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
when I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave mustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.
Onward to Kizer, Kumunyakaa, and Ryan.
Upholding the honor of K,
Katha
