An excerpt from
An American Poetry Vigil
by C. D. Wright
Every year the poem I most want to write, the poem that would in effect allow me to stop writing, changes shapes, changes directions.
It refuses to come forward, to stand still while I move to meet it, embrace and coax it to sit on the porch with me and watch the lightning bugs steal behind the fog's heavy veil, listen for the drag of johnboats through the orchestra of locusts and frogs. An old handplow supports the mailbox, a split-rail fence borders the front lot. Hollyhocks and sunflowers loom there. At the end of the lot the road forks off to the left toward the river, to the right toward the old chicken slaughterhouse. The poem hangs back, wraithlike, yet impenetrable as briar. The porch is more impressive than the rest of the house. A moth as big as a girl's hand spreads itself out on the screendoor. The house smells like beets. For in this poem it is always Arkansas, summer, evening. But in truth, the poem never sleeps unless I do, for if I were to come upon it sleeping, I would net it. And that would be that, my splendid catch.
In my book poetry is a necessity of life, what they used to call nontaxable matter. I cannot objectively trace how I reached this exaggerated conclusion, but perhaps I can summon the origins for my brand of tectonics in what would seem to many to be an age antithetical to the effort.
Many writers maintain a guarded border between language thick with hair and twigs and the reified, rarified stuff. No matter which side of the border poets live on, they tend to act as if they were being overrun. All I want is a day pass. I like to sleep in my own bed.Ultimately I don't believe any age is antithetical to the effort. I do believe years of reaction promote a thwarted artistic front. "Art is like ham," Diego Rivera said. I have often been reassured by this inexplicable claim. "Sometimes art (poetry) is like a beautiful sick dog that shits all over the house," Frank Stanford scribbled in a notebook. Not without a twinge of sadness, I agree with this claim too.
My purpose is neither to hack away at the canon nor to contrive a trend.
I am interested in fertile poetic constructions. I am aiming for the ode as a recourse, however short-term, from the same-old same-old careerist poem of no note, no risk, and no satisfaction, and from the equally piggish obsession with newness. The search for models in my terms becomes a search for alternatives.
My whole life I thought I was meant to do something useful — not for everyone, nothing on the scale of inventing Kleenex and making a pile for doing it, but something in which I felt the usefulness of it, the goodness of it in a non-Byzantine1 way. And I have come to feel separated from the possibility of being useful because I am an American poet. Maybe I did not choose poetry primarily because I believed it to be a necessary good, but I have abided by it because I believe this. Unlike, say, Oppen, I am not a purist. I am capable and comfortable with many vulgarities both in word and deed, especially in word. And I did not understand when I made this commitment that to choose being a poet meant I would be speaking what David Antin refers to as "a sacred language... the object of a specialized cult." Or if I did have such an inkling when I first undertook to write poetry, I didn't think anything was wrong with that at the time. Now I am sure poetry's lot is as he defined it and I oppose this exclusive and near meaningless status, yet I persist. Therefore, some quasi-futile, sometimes productive, psychic suffering.
Never put yourself in the position of having to defend the work before it is done.
Poetry is like food, remarked one of my first teachers, freeing me to dislike Rocky Mountain oysters and Robert Lowell. The menu is vast, the list of things I don't want in my mouth relatively short.
I am looking for a way to vocalize, perform, act out, address the commonly felt crises of my time. These are spiritual exercises.
Verbal energy on my part is expended on packing words down. I am concerned with density, setting up a chain reaction using the least amount of verbal material.
Much has been declared about the musicality of poetry. Not so much about the physicality. The adamantine practice of poetry as it pertains to touch — an impression of which can be lifted off the ends of the fingers. These are some of the things I have touched in my life that are forbidden: paintings behind velvet ropes, electric fencing, a vault in an office, gun in a drawer, my brother's folding money, the poet's anus, the black holes in his heart — where his life went out of him.
Phrases I prefer to associate with the lexicon of music rather than of linguistics, that is, the distinctiveness of a poetic phrase seems better identified among notes, tones, and rhythms, than among word aggregates with a single stress. By which I intend to say, a phrase is a sensory unit, physical but furthermore felt, not simply syntactic. A cold rain. is a phrase to me. And a sentence. So is what follows the rain, Quiet as a mirror. As are: A praying mantis in a jar. Barns blown down. Her rainy underarms. Faith hope and hypocrisy, phrases and sentences. Near physical beings to my way of sounding/thinking/feeling. I tune my instrument against my own eardrums.
Tell me, what is the long stretch of road for if not to sort out the reasons why we are here and why we do what we do, from why we are not in the other lane doing what others do.
We come from a country that has made a fetish if not a virtue out of proving it can live without art: high, low, old, new, fat, lean, and particularly the rarely visible, nocturnal art of poetry.
We must do something with our time on this small aleatory sphere for motives other than money. Power is not an acceptable surrogate. 2
I am even willing to argue passion is what separates us from other life-forms — that is, beyond the power to reason is our ability to escape from the desert of pure reason by its own primary instrument, language. And if it be poetry that makes the words flesh, then it is no less or more escapable than our bodies. But it is at least that free.
Veering in the elusory direction of freedom, I would submit, it is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free and declare them so. Always there are restrictions: as traditional conventions are more or less disavowed, others remain constant for longer periods, and another is revived after long periods of disuse. Poetry without form is a fiction. But that there is a freedom in words is the larger fact, and in poetry, where formal restrictions can bear down heavily, it is important to remember the cage is never locked.
I have been a keen but unsystematic student of book-length poems, in substance and design. Length admits them to the novel's province of inclusivity and digression, but redoubles the requisite for form. The need for form arises not so much for containment but for support. Form naturally determines the poem's movement, whether it be gradual, teleological, furious, or traveling in reverse. Otherwise, the stasis of art prose. Ugh.
At the margins of poetry, form is forced out of the frame under the sheer pressure of the language.
Five of us hold down the lines at The Poetry Center. Two in the archives. Three in the main office. We organize talks and readings, then videotape and distribute these events on a lending basis. For the students we also provide audiotapes, three bookcases, and a nondescript sofa. Some are regulars: D.F Brown, a Vietnam veteran, poet, native of Springfield; Forrest Gander, a Virginia poet, formerly a student of geology. Brown discovered poetry, rather was discovered by poetry, when he was nineteen and a half, in the infantry. Binh Dinh province. He was a nurse. In the infantry. A man of nineteen and a half. Boxes of books came to the base camp. For one reason or another Brown was habitually slow in reaching the mailroom, the last to rifle the book boxes, poetry the last to be rifled. After everything else, all the serious literature, all the theology, all the pulp and the porn, poetry would remain. On bottom, undisturbed. With little choice and less enthusiasm, Brown picked up a work by Robert Creeley. Thus one more of us was born: as gravity came to Newton and enlightenment to Siddhartha.
With a Creeley line, the mind doesn't need to fill in every word as it natters to itself; we know what he means, what he is thinking, what he sees. We've been invited. Inside. And if he chooses to interrupt himself, to pause abruptly, to leave a sentence uncompleted — we know what he means, what he is thinking, what he sees. We've been invited. He gives the gist. We are his familiars, the lines suggest. He can skip; he allows himself, and us, breathing room, and he is so unassuming in his friendliness that we permit his regulation of our very breath with big space, "unnatural" breaks, a poetic notation of his own devising. A line of three syllables much more frequent than one of twelve. A margin on the left as wide as the one on the right. A jarring break, as if stepping off a curb one didn't see, but catching and righting oneself midair. Perhaps there is something to the single eye informing the line; as El Greco's shapes were likely derived in part from an alleged astigmatism, Creeley's partial-sightedness intensifies attention to the center, drafting the outside, inside. The focus hangs in the middle, where emotion-bearing thought drops its plumb bob.
Poetry is tribal not material. As such it lights the fire and keeps watch over the flame. Believe me, this is where you get warm again. And naked. This is where you can remember the good times along with the worst; where you are not allowed to forget the worst, else you cannot be healed. This is where your memory must be exacting — where you and your progeny are held accountable but also laudable. Even and especially in our day, in our amnesiac land, poets are the griots, the ones who see that the word does not break faith with the line of the body.
I believe that many members of "the tribe" — not to say that we were the first but that we were the last — suffer the retrenchment of human possibilities, possibilities which for our thousand-and-one errors, we helped to create, which include the right and the delight in choosing writing, even writing poetry, over lawyering, banking, spying, advertising, politicking, and other predatory arts, and that in helping to create these possibilities we simultaneously infected other areas of the population with similar yearnings. Of course we failed, and of course it was doomed given the country's whole direction post-World War II, given our whole carnal history — after all, we called ourselves having a democracy in situ when we were the only remaining country publicly auctioning off our own species. Nevertheless, the tribe has some right to pride in our resistance, and to be pained by the losses that include, not bottom on my list, the further devaluation of poetry. "What lays waste my heart / lays waste, lays waste my art," Sharon Doubiago wrote in her big, declarative poem of America, Hard Country.
The bottom dropping out of a sack of black apples is dramatic enough for what I want to tell, which is after all proposed, not actual. If I tried too hard to be revelatory, well that was then. I don't try that hard now. I know life is strange and reveals itself on its own terms. The word is all that is the case. Now: a man joins a woman in the kitchen. They touch the soft places of their fruit. They enter in, tell their side, and pass through.
Forrest Gander would graduate from San Francisco State that spring. Gravely personal circumstances had brought him to poetry also. Concentrating both in earth science and English as an undergraduate at William and Mary, smitten by melanoma, spared but chastened, he chose poetry over, let's face it, a gig with an oil company hunting for uranium deposits. Not for the lodestone. Not for the locus Beckett plats for us, "...already old. The ditch is old. In the beginning it was all bright. All bright dots. It does not encroach on the dark. Adamantine darkness of these. As dense at the edge as at the centre..." It would not be in Texaco's interest to locate any position so remote and near as what Beckett described, which could be an acre of hell on earth. Or heaven. The dually maintained residences of poetry.
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1 Byzantine, Byzantinism, or Scholasticism employs here Gramsci's usage, meaning the regressive tendency to treat so-called theoretical questions as if they had a value in themselves, independently of any practice — a principle put forth in the Prison Notebooks.
2 The eclectic Bulgarian scholar Elias Canetti fastidiously stylized his 550-page study Crowds and Power to conclude simply, "To be the last man to remain alive is the deepest urge of every real seeker after power."
Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil
by C. D. Wright
Copper Canyon Press
Port Townsend, Washington
© 2005 by C. D. Wright
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Author photo by Forrest Gander.
Poetry Daily / Amazon.com
Selected books available by C. D. Wright:
Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil — Paperback
Steal Away: Selected and New Poems — Paperback
