The Life of the Poet
The Life of the Poet
Peter Sirr
I should, given the title, begin with a couple of notes of caution, even disappointment. There will be no biography on offer, no intimate revelations, no drinking escapades, no poets with their trousers down or clothes in disarray. I suppose weirdly the title came to me after reading a book that did all those things, revealed everything about the poet’s life, itemising the rows, the betrayals, the outward messiness that sustained the inner life. I came away from that book – actually a perfectly good, serious and sympathetic biography – wondering why exactly I found it so alienating. I think it’s because I realised how little I was interested in the private doings of a poet. A little knowledge can certainly throw light on a poet’s work, but what I’m really interested in, preoccupied by, what I’ve devoted my own faculties to is the life of the poem, and it’s only at the point where the life of the poet intersects with the life of the poem and for the duration of the poem that the biographical element holds interest for me. If I’m reading, to take a random but well known example, Robert Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays’, I register the poverty of the scene, the father rising ‘in the blueblack cold’ and polishing his son’s shoes, I understand and appreciate the biographical moment that is at play, but what I’m really registering and appreciating is the skill and beauty of the poem, that phrase blueblack cold, the series of images of the father’s quiet and thankless labour, the resonance of those last lines ‘what did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices’. It’s the life of the poem that persists. I don’t know a huge amount about Robert Hayden beyond this, but I am interested in the making of the poem, the bones of the poem, the journey from first to last line, the way so much is built into that opening declaration, ‘Sundays too my father got up early’, that he always got up early, there was never a day he wasn’t about his quiet fatherly business. So much contained in that little three letter adverb ‘too’.
This is what poets do, they think minutely, obsessively about adverbs, nouns, syntax, where to break a line; they think about pace and rhythm and punctuation and white space, about the poem as an object in space and a sonic experience, about the formal and emotional journey, the interest of the trajectory, about telling the truth but telling if slant, about not being boring and sending the reader to sleep. Poets want to be magicians but most of time they’re stuck labouring in the fields or standing in the rain to use the Randall Jarrell image – a poet is someone who after a lifetime of standing in the rain is lucky to be struck by lightning two or three times. I believe in standing in the rain, in the act of attention of attentiveness that might, just might, deliver a line, an image, a poem.
It might seem like an obvious thing to say but a poet’s life is dedicated to the making of poems. There’s a phrase in Adrian Frazier’s recent biography of John Montague I was struck by: ‘the poetry is above the poet, the poet is above the teacher, the love, the father, the husband and the brother’. Yes, the context of that sentence was to argue for the necessity of biography: ‘It’s easier to tell the truth about your subject if your real purpose is to tell the story of how the life turned itself into the achievement of the poetry.’ The first quote is what really interests me, the idea of the poetry above and beyond the poet, the poet being above all the other things he or she might do to live in the world, above even all the other roles inhabited in a life – father , mother, wife, husband, lover, son, daughter. Personally I don’t think poets should think themselves somehow excused from life or love and I get a little impatient with high romantic notions about the priestly devotion to art, as if art can’t be part of life rather than a chilly outgrowth from it, yet I still take seriously that for any poet the most serious task, the most fulfilling impulse will always be the writing of poems. The problem of course is that it’s not guaranteed, as in that image of the rain. Sometimes, even often, it’s not there. Nothing stirs. There’s just silence and the poet becomes an inhabiter of silence.
When Michael Longley died I was thinking about some of the things he said. I’m sure we all know the one – ‘If I knew where poems came from I’d go there’, but there was a twelve year hiatus between The Echo Gate in 1979 and Gorse Fires in 1991, and he said of that gap: ‘If you’ve got nothing to say, say nothing’. Yet he went on to write another nine collections, so if we look at the whole life then we also realise that he was no less a poet in that twelve year silence than he was in the years of poetic plenty that followed. It’s interesting to compare poetry and prose in that context. I wrote a couple of novels and I’ve done plays too and it nearly killed me, all that sitting down. I felt like a civil servant oppressed by terrifying logistics and unrealistic deadlines, and I felt like Patrick Kavanagh writing Tarry Flynn, when he says: ‘I’ve had this fucker out in the field for the last two weeks and I’ve no idea how to bring him in’. But there is in prose this continuity of effort. There is a clear relationship between time and achievement.
Poetry on the other hand is always history: you know that you possibly were a poet when you wrote your last poem; you don’t know if you will be a poet in the future. You don’t know if you will be a poet tomorrow, or next week, let alone next year. I was reminded of this when I read an interview with Denise Riley:
FP: What is next for you as a poet?
DR: I wouldn’t lay claim to that phrase ‘as a poet’. I never know if I’ll ever manage another poem; I suspect this is a common uncertainty – if so, I wonder about exactly why that is.[i]
So do I, so do all of us who try to write poems. Some poets, the lucky ones, manage to make a sweet music out of that silence:
Adam Zagajewski
Transformation
Listen
I haven’t written a single poem
in months.
I’ve lived humbly, reading the paper,
pondering the riddle of power
and the reasons for obedience.
I’ve watched sunsets
(crimson, anxious),
I’ve heard the birds grow quiet
and night’s muteness.
I’ve seen sunflowers dangling
their heads at dusk, as if a careless hangman
had gone strolling through the gardens.
September’s sweet dust gathered
on the windowsill and lizards
hid in the bends of walls.
I’ve taken long walks,
craving one thing only:
lightning,
transformation,
you.[ii]
A less comforting version of this is Miroslav Holub’s ‘Conversation with a poet’:
Conversation with a poet
Are you a poet?
Yes, I am.
How do you know?
I’ve written poems.
If you’ve written poems it means you were a poet. But now?
I’ll write a poem again one day.
In that case maybe you’ll be a poet again one day. But how will you know it is a poem?
It will be a poem, just like the last one.
Then of course it won’t be a poem. A poem is only once and can never be the same a second time.
I believe it will be just as good.
How can you be sure? Even the quality of a poem is for once only and depends not on you but on circumstances.
I believe that circumstances will be the same too.
If you believe that then you won’t be a poet and never were a poet. What makes you think you are a poet?
Well, I don’t rightly know. And who are you?[iii]
The ‘you’ is the inner demon you carry around with you: the doubting, questioning, restless and maybe sceptical spirit whose job is to keep you awake at night, whose job is to pull the rug of complacency from under your feet. Instability, uncertainty, fragility, they’re the keys. You can’t ever have a secure sense of your vocation as a poet. I heard Paul Muldoon say something similar recently. He said, about being an older poet: all you know is whatever you do will probably be worse than what you’ve done before. It’s a bleak thought, isn’t it? The longer you do something the worse you get. Imagine if your doctor said that to you, or your surgeon as you’re being wheeled into your operation. I’m not as good with the scalpel as I used to be.
Leaving the age question aside, the truth is you live from hand to mouth as a poet, from silence to silence. This brings me, temporarily, to another unhelpful notion. Poetry is very hard to talk about. Talk requires fluency, sensible progression, rational thought processes. Poetry is hesitant, fragmented, inching its awkward way forward. Prose about poetry can reduce it to the level of an argument, can incorporate it into a bland kind of discourse. The truth is poetry is difficult and difficult to be cerebral about, or talk about sensibly and helpfully. I say that as someone who spends a fair amount of time trying to just that – trying to find a way of writing about the poets and poetry I admire. If you’ve ever written an essay about poetry you’ll know that it’s not always the easiest thing to do, because you have negotiate a fundamental contradiction: on the one side the logical mind about its judicious business, on the other texts which are not creatures of analytic cerebration.
Poetry is – or so at least I like to think of it – a kind of anti-talk. It’s not a chat room, it’s not necessarily a conversation. Yes, it deploys language, but it does so for its own purposes; it’s communication, but a different kind of communication, from body to body as well as from mind to mind; it’s a physical as well as a mental event, a sonic event, a musical event, a visceral experience.
It happens that the form of our age is narrative, narrative dominates everything, it’s the big commercial drug, but poetry is anti-narrative, it’s about slowing down, it’s about skewing the perspective, it’s about emotional, impulsive impact even before it’s about being understood, it needs to be replayed in the mind, or in the spirit, it operates differently on us – it runs the course of the Wallace Stevens definition of poetry as ‘that which resists the intelligence almost successfully’. Poetry is slow food, organic farming, it has to be eaten slowly …
And I don’t mean by any of this to talk up the mysteriousness of poetry, to suggest it’s a secret code understood by adepts. Poetry can have a forensic clarity to it, can be a mode of scientific inquiry. Here’s Holub again, on science and poetry (he was an immunologist as well as a poet):
The emotional, aesthetic and existential value is the same … when looking into the microscope and seeing the expected (or at times the unexpected, but meaningful) and when looking at the nascent organism of the poem.[iv]
I want to go back to the idea of silence and time, and also the ways a poet’s life enters but also vanishes from the finished poem.
Here is a well known poem by the subject of that biography I mentioned earlier: John Montague: A Poet’s Life.
All Legendary Obstacles
All legendary obstacles lay between
Us, the long imaginary plain,
The monstrous ruck of mountains
And, swinging across the night,
Flooding the Sacramento, San Joaquin,
The hissing drift of winter rain.
All day I waited, shifting
Nervously from station to bar
As I saw another train sail
By, the San Francisco Chief or
Golden Gate, water dripping
From great flanged wheels.
At midnight you came, pale
Above the negro porter’s lamp.
I was too blind with rain
And doubt to speak, but
Reached from the platform
Until our chilled hands met.
You had been travelling for days
With an old lady, who marked
A neat circle on the glass
With her glove, to watch us
Move into the wet darkness
Kissing, still unable to speak.[v]
This is a poem I’ve had in my head a long time. Like a lot of people, I imagine. As it happens, because I’ve read the biography, I know a bit about the origins of the poem. I know that the originating incident was Christmas time in 1955 when Montague was waiting for his love Madeleine de Brauer to arrive by train all the way from Chicago to San Francisco. I know that there was serious flooding that even made the newspapers in Ireland, that the train was very late and that the poet kept shifting from station to bar and back again , and I know that, as the poem also tells me that when she did at last arrive the two lovers kissed and wept and were unable to speak. I also know, and actually this is more interesting to me, that the poem took ten years to write. Those very memorable twenty-four lines took ten whole years to arrive at the state in which we know them today – a very long train ride indeed. There is, then, as much silence as incident packed into the poem, as much absence as intense presence, as much laborious effort as seeming ease. It’s as if all those legendary obstacles lay not just between the two impatient lovers but also between the poem’s gestation and its final articulation. But let’s go back to the poem. Do we need any of those extraneous biographical details I supplied you with?
When Dennis O’Driscoll asked him in an interview to explain the circumstances the poet replied:
Is that fair? Should I? … It’s a complicated poem: there’s a lot of water in it, railway trains in it (I lived close to the old ‘El’ when I was a boy in Brooklyn). But I don’t really want to explicate it, except that the Orpheus myth comes in[vi] …
We don’t need more than what’s there, he’s saying, while allowing that it’s not, as no good poem really is, exclusively personal. It’s a poem that’s full of its own finely realised detail, it is its own fully convincing world. We are right in there with the nervous man and the finally arriving woman, head shining like a vision as she emerges from beneath the porter’s lamp. We are also caught up in the poem’s arresting formal texture. Think of that opening – not just the legendary obstacles between us, that already move the poem to a plane of myth, to something more than the immediately personal, but ‘between/Us’, between linebreak, capital U, Us’. To me the whole drama of the poem begins with that line break, a sort of minor unlegendary obstacle the poem puts in front of us – maybe because the poem wants to mimic that awkward waiting, those restless hours. Then those magnificent obstacles before we get to the ‘I’ of ‘All day I waited’. The long imaginary plain, the monstrous duck of mountain, the flooding and hissing winter rain. All geography is between us, all of this huge, barely explored land with its unreal mountains and shifting weathers. And then the drama of the trains in their fabulous names, the San Francisco chief or Golden Gate, and there it is again, the strange linebreak, the one your mentors and tutors tell you not to use, and O.K, it sort of rhymes with far, but still … And the rain dripping from the wheels , ‘great flanged wheels’ . What are flanged wheels? Train wheels , wheels with projecting flanges to keep the trains on the tracks, and an interesting shift of perspective to the wide angle zoom of imagination to the photographic close up of the dripping flanges. The rest of the poem tells the human story, but again with great spareness and drama, so we can’t separate the poem’s artfulness from the scene it describes, we absorb both.
At midnight you came, pale
Above the negro porter’s lamp.
I was too blind with rain
And doubt to speak, but
Reached from the platform
Until our chilled hands met.
You had been travelling for days
With an old lady, who marked
A neat circle on the glass
With her glove, to watch us
Move into the wet darkness
Kissing, still unable to speak.
That last perspective shift is brilliant, isn’t it? The old lady wiping the condensation from the window to watch the two departing lovers, kissing , though still too overcome to speak. He had written that part, it was one of the aspects he had resolved, and retrieved it when he was finalising the poem.
How long does that moment take? How long was the whole day of waiting? How many hours was the train ride? Maybe twelve hours at the outside. Yet that time is expanded out into ten years before shrinking back into those few hours. How long does it take us to read it? How many times do we read it? Or, indeed, how many times do we read any poem? What is the poem’s relationship with time? Is there such a thing as lyric time, of suspended poem time, recurring poetry time, a poem as a constantly recurring zone of time?
In the life of the poet days go by without a poem, months pile up, even years. We saw those twelve years of Michael Longley’s silence. John Montague wasn’t silent for his ten years of writing ‘All Legendary Obstacles’, he was busy with other poems and projects. But I had this question of time on my mind a lot recently when I opened the New York Times, or rather, loaded it up on the laptop screen and had a kind of digitally enhanced experience of a poem by George Oppen. You can find the poem on the Poetry Foundation website and hear him read it, which I strongly recommend.
George Oppen
From a Photograph
Her arms around me—child—
Around my head, hugging with her whole arms,
Whole arms as if I were a loved and native rock,
The apple in her hand—her apple and her father,
and my nose pressed
Hugely to the collar of her winter coat—. There
in the photograph
It is the child who is the branch
We fall from, where would be bramble,
Brush, bramble in the young Winter
With its blowing snow she must have thought
Was ours to give to her.[vii]
The title of the article is ‘I Swear This Poem Didn’t Make Me Cry’. It’s written by the critic A. O. Scott and is part of a series in which he presents poems that have meant something to him. The title is maybe an indication of the kind of effect he wants a poem to have on him; it reminds me of anthologies like Poems To Make Grown Men Cry. The poem isn’t like that, it’s not sentimental though in fact it is very moving. It’s built on the close observation of a photograph of the poet’s daughter, a photo looked at many years after it was taken and that distance is I think important to the poem’s effect. It’s very important too that the poet is looking at a photograph rather than remembering directly. It means he can present his scene in a camera-like fashion, as a kind of verbal photograph. It’s the grammar of a photograph, if you like, verbless presentation – we don’t get a verb until the second stanza. ‘Her arms around me dash child dash. Consider those dashes, what do they do? They stop us or slow us down, force us to look hard. ‘Her arms around me. Child. The arms of my child around me, ‘Around my head, hugging with her whole arms’. That adjective whole, her whole arms, how brilliantly it conveys the absolute trusting affection of a child, as does the rest of that movement, turning the father into a ‘loved and native rock’. All of the photograph’s details are registered with the same quiet intensity, recorded because they are there: the apple, the winter coat, the father’s nose, and again that chimes with the whole arms, ‘pressed/Hugely to the collar’. The poem wants to keep reminding us that it’s a photograph yet ‘it’s exactly at this point that it takes an unexpected turn, a turn that shifts our whole understanding of it – and actually this is something I keep coming back to in poetry, keep coming back to poetry for – the lift off , the volta, the turn that catches us by surprise and puts the poem on a different track, alters the destination. ‘There in the photograph’ and then comes a break, itself a signal that something is about to happen: so what is it ?
There
in the photograph
It is the child who is the branch
We fall from, where would be bramble,
Brush, bramble in the young Winter
With its blowing snow she must have thought
Was ours to give to her.
We’re no longer in a photograph, or just in a photograph. We’re in a kind of domain of revelation: ‘the child is the branch/ We fall from …’ The roles of the first stanza seem to be reversed. The child is the parent, the branch we fall from, picking up on the apple in her hand; our children grow up, grow strong, will leave us behind, their time will precede ours, they will outlive us. In the poem though, we keep noticing how we fall, the unexpected way Oppen describes it: ‘where would be bramble,/ Brush, bramble in the young winter’. The winter too is a kind of child that will get stronger, and that must seem to a child like a gift, as the whole world must seem to a child like a gift we, the great grown up wise ones, can bestow.
This poem comes from so closely looking at the photograph that it maybe might help us to see the photograph.
George Oppen and his daughter, Linda. Mary Oppen, via New Directions
Does the poem make more sense to us having seen this? Does the photo throw particular light on aspects of the poem? Can we see how his daughter is like a branch he might fall from to bramble and brush below ? I should say that this is quite an exceptional image, and moment, in that George Oppen was the opposite of a confessional poet. We’ve seen that John Montague saw his poetry as chapters in autobiography, proceeding more or less seamlessly from stage to stage. George Oppen, on the other hand, did not write to reveal his own life or to use it as an instrument of exploration. Yet here we are looking at this photograph taken by Mary, the wife of the poet, looking at his daughter Linda, and finding, possibly, that it throws an illuminating light on the poem, maybe even that it enhances our experience of the poem, this little attested bit of the poet’s life leaking in.
The photo was taken in the early 1940s, many years before the poem was written. Oppen was a labour organiser and a Communist, an exponent of Objectivism, along with Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker. They focused on things, on the poem as structure, on images. It’s not a particularly useful term and was more a flag of convenience invented by Harriet Monroe for the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine. As Carl Rakosi said: ‘The term is a bit of a nuisance, because it has to be defined and it can’t be done when you try to use our work as evidence. There’s too much difference among us, for one thing, and one gets lost trying to define Objectivist or Objectivism as a theoretical concept’.[viii] Maybe Oppen’s own definition of it as ‘the sense of the poet’s self among things’ is the most useful. Despite serious earlier work, for instance in his book length poem Discrete Series, Oppen moved away from poetry into politics, working in New York for the Communist Party, working as a tool maker and mechanic, fighting in World War II, where he was awarded a Purple Heart. Despite that he came to the attention of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, and was in clear dangerous being arrested, so they made a run for it, just ahead of the FBI, and moved to Mexico where George worked as a furniture maker until 1957. They were under surveillance that whole period, still regarded as dangerous activists. During this time, and I think this is my main reason for recounting it, , he wrote nothing, not a single poem. There are twenty-eight years between his first book and his second, The Materials. Was he a poet in those years of silence and furniture making? That photograph clearly contained the seed of a poem, just as Montague’s experience in a San Francisco train station would continue to ramify – every year, on Madeleine’s birthday, he would try to write the poem that would be true to that experience. Maybe Oppen knew at the moment he pressed his nose hugely into his daughter’s coat that he would revisit this scene in a poem. When we look at the photograph, having read the poem, it becomes hard for us to separate the two. We bridge the time between the photograph and the poem, we become the father and the daughter and simultaneously the poet inheriting the same temporal space. Life, photograph and poem merge indissolubly in our hearts and minds. We enter, I think, a kind of presence that for me is one of the ultimate destinations of a poem.
Before leaving Oppen I want to take another short poem that offers the same presence. It’s called ‘Psalm’, the title evoking, a sacred song, or hymn, evoking worship, the Biblical Book of Psalms …
Psalm
Veritas sequitur …
In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!
Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass
The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun
The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.[ix]
So much about this poem embodies the way Oppen thought about poetry, his hungering for precision and spareness, his wish not to intrude on the poem; he said once that he was ‘really concerned with the substantive, with the subject of the sentence, with what we are talking about, and not rushing over the subject matter in order to make a comment about it.’ Can you see that lack of rush here, that wanting to let the world speak for itself, which the epigraph from Aquinas alerts us to. Veritas sequitur esse rerum (Truth follows from the existence of things). ‘Small beauty’, ‘alien small teeth’, ‘small nouns’ – we notice immediately the modesty of the language, the determined ordinariness of it; it’s especially evident in that declarative third line, which is also a climax of the poem, and one of the most beautiful lines. ‘That they are there!’ It’s as if this fact is somehow beyond description, beyond language, as if the poem as artefact interrupts itself to simply behold the deer; the poem lives on the vivid presence of its moment, and the same moment is repeated later in ‘They who are there’.
Yet at the same time this is a complex and unpredictable poem: ‘their eyes/Effortless’ … In what way can eyes be said to be effortless? It’s not an adjective you expect. Something is going on in the language, you feel. The observer’s eyes, the poet’s eyes, are effortful, perhaps – the deer isn’t trying to accomplish anything, he is simply there. And those ‘alien small teeth’ – alien to whom? Small to whom? Oppen makes us aware of the poet’s observing consciousness, and separates us from the deer, there’s no cute anthropomorphising. The scene is both immediate and strange, magical and forbidding. Consider the grammar of
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun
and again consider the language, grammar and purpose of the final stanza – he is writing very simply, he wants ‘small nouns’ and the faith which they imply in the world, in the ‘this’ in which the deer ‘startle, and stare out’.
There’s a lot you could say about a poem like this, but I really want to concentrate here on its urgency of expression, a kind of chaste simplicity and its sense of what has been left out, discarded, like a sculptor chiselling away until the bare form is left. Less is more, it’s the kind of writing, of gesture where you sense the aesthetic behind the work, where you realise that his way of writing is as much about the limitations of language as its expressiveness. It’s telling us, or he’s telling us to be wary of the temptations of language, of overreaching, of maybe consoling ourselves overly with its attractions. And indeed critics have remarked on exactly this quality. Hugh Kenner said of him in the New York Times Book Review: ‘Nothing better characterize[d] Oppen than his wariness about the language itself, this distrust of inherent fluency.’[x] And another critic, Mark Perlberg, commented: ‘Oppen seems … to distrust most of the processes of language. Perhaps in an attempt to achieve the purest kind of statement, perfect in its honesty, he seems wary of rhythm, of patterns of rhythm, of connections, [and] of the music a poem can make.’[xi] This seems to me very interesting – an interesting element of the life of a poet is to distrust the implements at his disposal, to entertain doubt even or especially about ‘the processes of language. And yet this apparent wariness, this distrust can bring about a poem of extraordinary beauty, and it’s one I keep going back to, maybe strangely, to assure myself of the possibilities of poetry.
It reminds me of another poem by Adam Zagajewski:
Moths
Moths watched us through
the window. Seated at the table,
we were skewered by their lambent gazes.
Harder than their shattering wings.
You’ll always be outside,
past the pane. And we’ll be here within,
more and more in. Moths watched us
through the window, in August.[xii]
That glass, that inside and outside.
The life of the poet, to return to my title. Sitting and staring, reading, communing with the past, quietly thinking. Poetry is a quiet art. A lot of poets are barely visible. There are little known lives as well as famous lives. There are great unknown poets, or poets who were unknown in their lifetimes but who have accumulated a little renown after their deaths. Since I was talking about George Oppen and the Objectivists, it’s a short step to Lorine Niedecker, very much associated with them but a highly individual poet, a singular figure in twentieth century American poetry, who lived her life in obscure poverty on Black Hawk Island in South Wisconsin, a poet who liked to strip away everything non-essential, who saw her poems, sometimes, as a kind of folk gesture, a modernist Mother Goose – the first privately published collection was called New Goose. For her folk poems were places of wit and subversion, alive as much to politics as the personal life. That slip of an island, close to the water and regularly flooded, was her childhood home, and the place she kept coming back to
Paean to Place
And the place
was water
Fish
fowl
flood
Water lily mud
My life
in the leaves and on water
My mother and I
born
in swale and swamp and sworn
to water[xiii]
Sworn to water, and sworn to poetry. That pull to a place can function as a deeply spiritual connection which can strip out the kind of worldly ambition we’re so used to. Niedecker’s world is a reduced place, but one which keeps drawing us back:
For sun and moon and radio
farmers pay dearly;
their natural resource: turn
the world off early.[xiv]
or
Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths?
Fourteen washrags, Ed Van Ess?
Must be going to give em
to the church, I guess.
He drinks, you know. The day we moved
he came into the kitchen stewed,
mixed things up for my sister Grace—
put the spices in the wrong place.[xv]
Who is Ed Van Ess and why is buying those fourteen washcloths? We’ll never know, though we’ll certainly remember Ed Van Ess. I love the total self-sufficiency of this poem, its created world, its voice. It’s an aesthetic summed up in one of her best known poems, ‘Poet’s Work’:
Poet’s work
Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoff
from this
condensery[xvi]
That seems to me like a pretty good occupation, sitting at the desk and condensing. My parting exhibit is the exact opposite of this, a poem from Denise Riley’s latest collection, Lurex, that presents another vision of the life of a poet, or, maybe, a certain kind of poet. The poem is printed vertically in her book, so you have to imagine rotating the page through 180 degrees:
–
[i]. ‘In Conversation with Denise Riley’
Posted 25 September 2021
https://forwardartsfoundation.org/in-conversation-with-denise-riley/
[ii]. ‘Transformation’ from Without End: New and Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski, translated by several translators, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003,
- 214
[iii]. Miroslav Holub, Poems Before and After, Bloodaxe Books, 2006, translated by Ian Milner, Jarmila Milner, George Theiner and Ewald Osers, p192
[iv]. Miroslav Holub, ‘Poetry and Science’ in The Dimension of the Present Moment (Faber and Faber, 1990).
[v]. John Montague, New Collected Poems, Gallery Press, p. 229
[vi]. Irish University Review, Spring 1989
[vii]. George Oppen, New Collected Poems, New Directions, p. 68
[viii]. American Poetry Review, volume 32, number 4, July-August 2003
[ix]. George Oppen, New Collected Poems, New Directions, p. 99
[x]. ‘Poems made like a chair, each part joined and tested’, New York Times Books Review, 19 October 1975
[xi]. Poetry, Vol. 126, No. 3 (Jun., 1975), pp. 172-174
[xii]. Adam Zagajewski, Selected Poems, tr. Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C.K. Williams, Faber, p. 77
[xiii]. Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, edited by Jenny Penberthy, University of California Press, 2002, p. 261
[xiv]. ibid. p. 94
[xv]. ibid. p. 95
[xvi]. ibid. p. 194
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“The Life of the Poet”, by Peter Sirr, was presented as The Joan McBreen Lecture for Strokestown International Poetry Festival, on Sunday 4 May 2025.