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If Only the Poets

by Ray Gonzalez, June 26, 2014

As I write, I think about Miguel Hernandez’s poem, “Will This Beam of Light,” where he says, “This obstinate rock pushes its bud out of me/and it aims the insistent power of its lightnings,/ deadly and raining, straight at me.” Does it matter why I carry poets from the past with me? Hernandez lived a tragic life and died of starvation and tuberculosis in one of Franco’s Spanish prisons in 1942. Can the reasons for holding onto certain poets extend beyond taking some of their favorite poems wherever I go? Does his tragic death have anything to do with my need to keep his poetry close? Will it change my way of looking at poetry, desiring the next poem, or dreaming about the lives of poets I have admired without knowing whether I am romanticizing their tragedies or am simply unable to find my next original poem? The answers to these questions lie hidden in thousands of poetry books I have collected for 40 years.

*

The pig in the corral was a lovely, dirty pink. I was reading a new edition of T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems while I watched the pig dig his wonderful mud in the pen, at a farm twenty miles south of my home in Minnesota. Am I trying to insult Eliot by reading him while the animal digs among its shit? After all, the new edition of his work came in the mail and I must review it for a journal that publishes my thoughts on poetry. How did I wind up visiting a pig farm in the first place? Where are the connections that can ignite new ideas for a poem, despite the shitty mud, and who decides the odor coming from the pens is enough to start thinking creatively as I walk away and, hesitantly, take Eliot’s book with me?

*

We are haunted by poetic voices from the past. As fellow creators of verse, we can’t get away from visionaries that have come before, a tendency to often accept the persona of the poet long before we accept the written work. As we write new poems, we gain distance from our worship of key poets, though George Oppen refused to be worshipped. He was busy pulling bricks out of the wall, one at a time, trying to fend off potential worshippers by showing how the poetic wall still stands after pulling many of its bricks. In “The Mind’s Own Place,” he writes, “Modern American poetry begins with the determination to find the image, the thing encountered, the thing seen each day whose meaning becomes the meaning and the color of our lives.” Part of this meaning, whether interpreted by a public readership or in the private domain of the sole poet reading Oppen, can never be separated from what we know about the author and his personal life. We can’t seem to get away from facts, even if we spend a lifetime washing subjectivity out of our play with words.

*

The water in the lake beyond the wall is actually a field of glass where poets go to stare at their reflections. Oppen kept busy, though he refused to write a poem for 25 long years, allowing two and a half decades of possible work to pass him by because he kept his belief that no poem could overcome the political realities of the bloody 20th century. He insisted nothing had been wasted during his years of silence because the poems are constantly being lifted as text, then cemented back into place or torn down by a new generation of readers. In an untitled poem from Discrete Series, Oppen writes, “It brightens up into the branches/And against the same building/A morning:/His job is as regular.” The job of the poet is to be who he is, while future eyes manipulate their own language influenced by his voice. “We simply know too much,” Oppen says in one of his daybooks.

*

I dare any poet to shut up and not write poems for years. If we did, what would we talk about? Would our dreams disappear? Would the hungry ego find another outlet or would it keep its mouth shut for 25 years? There would be nothing to devour beyond that ego of language and the need to entertain our minds as we paint invisible verse with words, tracing each of our poems out of mid-air because each of them were written before we were born. If this sounds silly, what are you doing shaking your heads and asking if I have something more important to say about poetry?

*

I am shocked one day when six of my undergraduate poetry workshop students tell me they write their poems on typewriters! What? Have I heard correctly? Yes, six young writers in their early twenties own typewriters on which they compose their poems. I am stunned because, in this cyber drenched world, every young writer I have known or had in my classes is dependent on a computer and never leaves it alone. These six claim they love to write on old standard typewriters because it slows down the process and they like to look closely at each line of a poem in order to contemplate what has appeared on the page and what they can do about it. I am amazed because this process is obsolete, though it is how I grew up as a writer—the slow write-in-a-notebook turning to the clacky typewriter exposing the stanzas carefully on the white sheet. I am suspicious that part of the reason these six love typewriters has to do with their obsession with Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation. We read some of his poems and watched a film on his life that semester, but they were hooked before they came to my workshop. Since Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road on an endless roll of butcher paper, typing away non-stop, I believe my typing poets have turned that into a romantic notion they have put to good use.

The rest of the class swears by their laptops, though most admit to keeping notebooks for a quick note or ideas for poems. I want to buy typewriters for all seventeen students and to rebuild my approach on writing poems. All of a sudden, I am back to the mid-sixties when I got my first manual Smith Corona after finishing my high school typing class. Six typewriters! Plus, the typists are some of the best poets in the class. There is a retro secret here—a linguistic, mechanical swing back in time when the pure creation of a poem was a physical act from the writing hand in the notebook to the fingers pounding the keys on the typewriter. It is me as a young writer, though I got rid of my last typewriter at least twenty-five years ago. The poems are still emerging, but the sound of composition is now muted on computer as my six students attempt a small and louder revolution they don’t even know is going on.

*

The yellow notebooks are stored in the attic. Through them, I trace personal experiences back to my childhood. I know when the idea for my first poem came, and a few thousand poems later I have grown older and the endless cycle of writing comes back onto itself, year in and year out. I tell my writing students that poets are obsessed with only one or two things in their careers and each poem needs to find a different way of saying the same thing, over and over. The diagram of speech is hidden and the effective image is glowing over my shoulder. One day, I discover that the poem of mine I truly admire was taken from my yellow notebooks by James Wright, who returned to Minneapolis 33 years after his death to simply tear out one of my poems and take it to wherever he resides. How do I know this preposterous story is true? The mind of poetry allows me to think about poets I love as being clever thieves. Instead of having to steal from them, they are stealing from me. Is this ego, an imagination gone wild, or a fragment in a newer notebook that wants to belong to John Ashbery? No, it is the theft of one of my poems by James Wright and I am honored to be his guest in the life of poetry. Do you hear me, James Wright? You have stolen one of my poems and it is a great honor, though the existence of a lively imagination within the fantasy of poetry is as vital as the most sobering, serious, and dark poem anyone can write. Upon departing again, Wright tells me, “The last time I prayed to escape my body, you threw me down into a tangle of roots.”

*

When the poem is safely hidden in my heart, some poets tell me I can’t hide it there because emotion in poetry is outdated and not cool. I can’t experiment or be allowed a membership in the avant-garde if I carry a poem in my heart. That would be a grave sin and I would be branded a fraud if I brought my heart along to the poetry game, thus giving emotion great importance. If I do get sentimental or romantic, I am violating the modern lyric by being too subjective. If so, perhaps John Ashbery will approach me so I can tell him he is now one of my favorite poets and it has taken me decades to get there. I think I get it. I can feel it, see it, and honor Ashbery’s work. He has nothing to do with the issue of being too emotional because the multiple dimensions in his work are one reality that takes imagination beyond our inability to experience it. What did I just say? I can’t even find the appropriate Ashbery poem to quote because the two or three I thought I could draw from have vanished into my stack of his books. The one I totally admire is right there, but I need to breathe and there is something microscopic moving on the wall across from my writing desk.

*

Pablo Neruda died for my sins.

*

James Wright died of throat cancer in 1981 so the poem of the great river in our lives could no longer sing. Yet, the poem of the great river is singing above the silenced voice of James Wright.

*

In my privacy, I write a poem by hand in a notebook, scratch out and flip pages. I have a record of my scratching, my doodles, and misdirections encased in brittle, yellowing paper that needs to find an archive where it can slowly and privately decay. My wrist gets sore and I dig through containers of favorite pens, then sit at the computer and transfer the first draft onto a file. I revise on the screen, print out, revise with a pen, then go back to the keyboard. Nothing unusual about this, but these steps are the stones left in the ground by someone else, a poet who insisted he could help me by not pulling all the worn stones out of the path because, if he did, I would be lost and on my own. In the rare moment I compose a new poem on the computer, I do not know what is going to come out because I punish my handwriting hand by not using it and have sent the notebook to the attic, instead.

Of course, composing on the computer is a risk because I am saving each draft on a separate file. I am revising on the screen and only print out the final version which means earlier drafts are gone forever, unless I slow down and bother to make a new file for each revision. There are some computer-driven poets who save every draft, keeping file upon file over one poem. My revisions are in my notebooks, but I am afraid that in the age of the computer, my notebooks are starting to feel incomplete. This disconnection between my hand movement and the final draft on the computer means I am tracing something that has been there, waiting for me for centuries. All I have done is fill in the words. How can I believe this after discussing computers and how they propel the poem farther away from its creator? Can a computer-created poem be explained by saying the poem has always existed before my impulse to write it and the computer typing allows me to fill the eternal invisible with words? I make no sense here because the truth is in my yellowing notebooks, written and collected for over forty years, and I refuse to show them to you. Go sit in front of the screen instead.

*

I hold a blank sheet of paper up in the air and my students stare at me. I wait a few seconds before announcing that “We write poems for the 8 ½ by 11 paper. We write poems for this size paper because the eggheads who invent the typing paper for western civilization decided this was the size. Print it out. Your poem is written for this size. What would we do if the eggheads had decided on a 14 by 17 sheet, instead?”

*

Often, I am asked how long it takes me to write a poem. This is a common question in workshops, classes, and in conversations with younger poets. Their curiosity over the struggle and how long it takes reminds me of a Hilda Doolittle fragment from her long poem, “Tribute to the Angels,” where she says, “Every hour, every moment/has its specific attendant Spirit;/the clock-hand, minute by minute,/ticks round its prescribed orbit;/but this curious mechanical perfection/should not separate but relate rather,/our life, this temporary eclipse/to that other . . .” The constant movement toward something else is where the answer to time in a poem lies. I am not speaking about time as a metaphor in the content of the poem, but rather the movement of bringing fresh words into play and watching the lines and stanzas reveal themselves. The rare poem that arrives in minutes, the common poem that takes a few hours, the familiar poem that takes days or weeks, and the monumental work that has been changing and erasing and building and moving toward something else for months. If H.D. is correct and each moment has its spirit, what happens to all of those transparent forces when the words fall into place? Can spirit remain in the physical act of writing or does the literal establishment of words onto a page erase any sense of “the other?” Does this mean that the movements toward “elsewhere” are only contained in the spiritual light that drives a poem and it disappears after the 8 ½ by 11 page has done its work? If so, this places complete responsibility on the reader to give life to the poem. In the end, the active role of the reader is activated through the attendant force of the poem. How long can I ponder this when my task is to try and write a good poem? I am releasing the invisible poem I have colored, so the unknown and unseeing eye of the poem can find its own spirit. I am human in my mechanical attempts to write poetry and it is “the poet” that rises to contemplate the aura of spirit.

*

I never visited a pig farm. I made it up, saw it in my mind, and wrote that paragraph between a chuckle or two. No pig poems have come out of this. Bringing Eliot into the picture was fun and it gave me ideas for a couple of new poems I abandoned when I got home. But, wait a minute. How could I have gotten home from the pig farm when I just said I made the whole thing up? I got home in the potential imaginary place of the poem. I was always in the poem and not in the pig pen because Eliot’s rich allusions to so many things do not allow me to dwell among the pigs because he has taught me how to hide things in poems. What was I saying about tracing a lyric that has been invisible and waiting for me? Does anyone believe in a poem or is it merely experience and the sound of things? Can our poetic heroes come to life without tragedy? Is poetic resurrection about the hero or the poem? Is poetic theory based on autobiography or are the roads of language that realign our way of thinking leading us on the wrong path? What if we actually sat down with blank minds and wrote a poem? What is a blank mind? Is it the hardworking Minnesota pig farmer coming out of the barn to ask me if I want to buy a baby pig? Do you want to see the torn notebook James Wright left on my attic floor? Can poets throw out as many questions as I have in the lines above? I need to stop because readers want poems without questions asked of them, though they reserve the right to ask questions of the poet at readings. When I write poems, I am hired to help George Oppen load his wheelbarrow with bricks. But I need to be careful and not bring wheelbarrows into this because I would have to come up with a theory for rain water and white chickens and I haven’t talked about William Carlos Williams. He is too important and I am afraid to write about him. After all, in “The Botticellian Trees,” he wrote, “The alphabet of/the trees/is fading in the/song of the leaves/the crossing/bars of the thin/letters that spelled/winter.” I am afraid because his vision, his direct need, and his ability to see all things is so overwhelming, I tend to look in the wrong direction before turning my head and heart until I focus on what I need to write.

*

The music of chance is not made of fragments or impersonal fracturing of lyrical methods that might lead one to conclude the poet’s experiments with language are successful. Who is to judge this when the poem can be interpreted in different ways, depending on the reader and what the inspector is hungry for? I have ideas that take me completely out of the poem, but these thoughts rarely appear again. I write a new poem and it is not an idea, but a reaction. When I react, my trial is complete and I have done something to let go of James Wright stealing my poem. I keep bringing him up without quoting him because he is probably my favorite American poet of the 20th Century and to quote him would be going too far. My silence over his words is the most valuable gift I am given and give in return. The silence in-between my poems makes me stronger.

*

I once told a friend of mine that one should not ask anything from his heroes. He looked at me as if he understood what I was saying. I nodded as if I knew something about poetry and how our dependence on favorite poets often leads us to expect miracles on the page. Poems burn the throat of silence as they release envy of other imaginative souls. When this is done, the fragile poet arrives at a new plane of belief and understanding, as if Rilke’s Duino Elegies finally make sense and the awesome angels are trying desperately to balance themselves on the high walls of the castle. When one of them, with his useless wings, topples over the edge and hundreds of feet to the bottomless moat, fresh approaches to language and new poems breaking the dark water. So much for angels.

*

All poets are needy.

*

The cliché and the stereotype—all poets are needy. They need to write what used to be pronounced and sung. They need to write what is always there, invisible in the air, the words of seeing and doing filled in by voice and tone and the written complexity of words. When I say nothing new here, a new poem appears in my notebook. It has nothing to do with theory but the breath of the heart.

*

William Carlos Williams crossed the Stanton Street International Bridge over the Rio Grande in El Paso to get to Juarez so he could write about the women he met in the cantinas and on the street—a typical reaction from a stranger to the area—but the whores he encountered in Juarez were an early twentieth century vision that rose from the desert heat to give him a sense that the landscape of poverty, cheap tourism, and desperate images was a place where the poet could write and walk away, crossing the bridge into the U.S. because the poems he left in my hometown were signals that home was where the poet could find it and the people that inhabited that home were going to appear in many poems over the years because the ten year old kid shining shoes outside the cantina was the son of the woman Williams spent time with and this son was speaking in verse at the age of three. As he leaves my hometown of El Paso, Williams asks, “And what is the fourth dimension? It is the end of knowledge.”

…

Ray Gonzalez is the author of 14 books of poetry including the forthcoming Soul Over Lightning (University of Arizona Press, 2014) and Beautiful Wall (BOA Editions, 2015). His work is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2014. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Note: the top image comes from the collection of The Walters Art Musuem: St. Jerome in His Study, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, the elder / Workshop of Pieter Coeke van Aelst, the elder, oil on panel, ca. 1530. Acquired by Henry Walters.

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