Hard To Say with William Stobb
miporadio: where poetry tunes in…
“Hard to Say,” episode 35–Mature Art: Ramke, Hass.
Posted by on March 22, 2010
With the 2009 release of Bin Ramke’s, Theory of Mind: New and Selected Poems, I reflect on one of poetry’s original appeals–a maturity of thought and expression. Ramke’s poems are smart and vulnerable, experimental and honest. They continue to remind me of why I wanted poetry in my life in the first place.
And with the opening of applications for the 2010 Squaw Valley Community of Writers, we listen back to Robert Hass’s closing talk at the 2009 poets’ week. Hass reflects on poets who stayed with their art and found their best poems later in their careers–inspiring words for all of us who fight to make time for poetry in our daily lives.
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Nice episode, Bill.
Interesting is Hass’s sense that we are all capable of writing a good poem at…any minute now. Roughly paraphrased. Interesting because on the one hand he points to major poets who in his estimation didn’t write their best work after 40, while with the other hand he points to others who wrote well later in life.
I think his claim that Pollock was finished or didn’t know what to do next assumes a few too many things based on one exhibition, but I see what he’s getting at. Some can and some can’t. (Pollock v. Rothko). This is what makes what he says interesting. While it’s wholly encouraging, it’s also saying that some simply can’t or don’t do it. What Eliot, Yeats, HD, and others did in their later years distinguishes them from, shall I say, lesser poets of great talent. (I’d say that Yeats improved substantially as a poet, whereas Eliot stayed just as genius as he was from the get; if Yeats hadn’t improved in his later years, I doubt his work would be regarded so highly.)
Why Hass doesn’t mention Whitman’s difficulty writing much substantial verse in his later years is likely due to time constraints in Hass’s talk, but it’s worth noting, I think, that Whitman achieved something and didn’t need to give more in his later years, though he tried, surely.
I there’s something subtly underlying Hass’s idea that poets/artists need to evolve and do other than what they have done or they are finished. I think he’s somewhat off the mark. Four Quartets resonates so deeply primarily because it resonates against the wood of our experiences with Prufrock (bad stringed instrument metaphor). It’s a revisiting, I think, of the voice Eliot could have used his entire life, but set aside as he explored an otherness, weighed his options. If we only had Prufrock, or only had Quartets, we’d be doing just fine as a species, but having them both as we do in all their broken romantic aspirations and excellence finds enhancement, likely, because this same fellow also gave us The Waste Land, and a so many, many lesser known gems in addition. Just one Prufrock, I think we can agree, is enough for one human/writer/artist/poet/shaman/tollbooth worker to give this world. See also: E=MC2, which while potentially incorrect and largely unprovable has fueled major advancements and interest in the nature of our universe. Cross reference with a few finches on the Galapagos, and we’re getting close to what I mean about contributions to our species as raison d’etre for the work some humans perform. I know this is a leap, but the goal of constancy of ones name generations after perishing might usefully be the motivation of philanthropists (Rockefeller, Carnegie), Statesmen, and, well, serial killers; it’s use as motivation for poets (not that Hass says it should be motivation) is untested, and I say unsound.
Unlike Hass, I don’t think it matters much how one is regarded (Tennyson v. Whitman) as poet once they have died. That’s a troublesome proposition, as it hints at the process of living as a poet and writing in order to make a futile stance against mortality… O that my name should live on, says this sort poet. Neither monuments nor the gilded says another, less selfishly perhaps. I’m with Keats, who in “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” sounds what I believe is the correct approach to writing and living–an admixture perhaps of carpe diem and “don’t worry about it while you’re alive” “go ahead and meditate on this world while you can” underpins the poem. (this is an email, and sadly I’m not revising my thoughts, but hope you see where I’m going with this).
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;–then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Of course, in my reading, I substitute or enact “this world” for “thee” in Keats’s “That I shall never look upon thee more.” For “faery power of unreflecting love” I substitute the simple magic of being, of being at all.
It’s a matter of stance, one might say. Among the 1,614 ways to live on this earth, at least two of them are readily apparent to poets.
1) Labor in defiance of our own mortality.
2) Write (well) as a means of encountering and documenting our lives, never mind the worth of our work to archivists and antholgists alike.
I don’t know what it says on the gravestone of many lesser poets, but upon the marker of Keats it reads, as he had wished:
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Just some loose and shortsighted thinking with my fingers attached to my brain.
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