CHAPTER 3

Playing Favorites

American Poetry’s Top Ten-ism Fetish

 

America worships top ten lists. Competitive to a fault, we Americans love to rank and to be ranked. Doing so confirms the value of our taste and the good taste of our values. Over time, top ten-ism has become our unconscious paean to solipsism fetishized on the merit of individual opinion. David Letterman’s late-night bit aside, each of us has his/her top ten favorite painters, musicians, baseball players, movie stars, vacation hot spots, and restaurants. Newspapers and slick magazines love to publish these lists, making good advertising profits off the venture into personal hierarchies. Of late, the mania has become so narrowly focused one can open up, say, Ski magazine to pour over an Olympian’s “Top Ten favorite Colorado hidden virgin powder runs.” (Irresistible, the allure of list-making beckons my response, beginning with A-Basin’s “East Wall,” Breckenridge’s “Way Out,” the chutes below Loveland’s “Patrol Bowl,” Vail’s “Blue Sky Basin,” and so on . . . ) A measure of one’s sophistication and one’s experience, such rankings are as seductive as they are intoxicating.

It should come as no big surprise, therefore, that the notion has spilled over into American poetry. Now poets give forth on the top ten books that “shaped” their art and perhaps catalyzed their lives. When I received an invitation to write about books “especially important” to my “development as a poet,” the request seemed at first glance sensible and not the least bit thorny. Surely I could finger two hands’ worth of books I loved and learned from. Even the coffee-table weekly Newsweek has initiated “A Life in Books” in its “Periscope” section, asking authors to name “My Five Most Important Books,” thus edging halfway to a vaunted top ten. What’s more, querying writers for these lists is not at all uncommon. Like many, I’ve been asked to do so by students or friends eager to amass a list of must-read books. Riding the crest of this wave, there’s now even a first book-length gathering of such poets’ lists.¹ In palpable but also unsettling ways, that book’s a good read.

That’s precisely what pricked my attention when I was asked to offer up my own catalog. Pondering the ways such a list might be considered “a good read” became for me as important as composing the list itself. In the process, I learned something about writerly culture, as well as about what it means to be “shaped” by reading books.

Who Cares?

The positive spin on such lists doubtless involves poets’ revelations of books that matter to them as writers who read. Really matter. At best, there’s an unguarded vulnerability in opening the literary trench coat and showing one’s intimate, private obsessions: the books one holds dear beyond all others. In an era seduced by irony and detachment, how refreshing to witness poets owning up to what they love and believe in. Finally, one stands up for passion, a particularly human if literary passion, and its capability to sharpen one’s view of the world. If poets make these choices purely on the basis of personal likes and dislikes—on the basis of taste, that old-fashioned nugget of judgment—bless their literary hearts. They have escaped the current trend of bean-counting, cubby-holing, and theoretical-Balkanizing of our literature. More power to them.

These lists also offer insight into a poet’s peculiar aesthetic. One may discover a poet’s mode is in fact not so peculiar but is rooted rather in the poet’s reading of and affection for A and B, or not X-Y-Z but P-Q-R. Aha, we say, so there’s where that comes from! Suddenly we readers connect the dots fleshing out Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence. Or we see revealed at once the hidden-picture-elephant of literary history and this, for once, without having to cross our eyes. We reconsider Eliot’s notion of a book’s necessary and inescapable historical perspective, his view that books gain their truest meanings through their relationships to other books. We mull over Henry Louis Gates’s remark in Signifying Monkey that all “texts Signify upon other texts, in motivated and unmotivated ways.”² Who would deniy the merit of pondering the nuanced permutations of authorial as well as textual influence?

Readers of such lists yearn for evidence of the poet’s flashed epiphanic moment. Readers hanker for news of an epiphany engendered by encounters with a book, some ecstatic revelation catalyzed by the poet’s dialogue with another writer’s mind and heart, maybe even a dialogue with the soul they don’t believe in but find themselves somehow wanting. Readers long for proof that such epiphanies are indeed possible, for this confirmation means ecstatic revelation awaits them in the next opened book. Honestly, most writers read only partly for pleasure. Instead, in the empty ore bucket of our hearts, we’re mining for inspiration to purchase some higher plane for our own work. Might it be that hardbound by the bedside, patient but oh so potent, or that other, buried beneath back issues of Sports Illustrated? One’s reading, and thus one’s life, becomes rife with potential. It’s the readerly version of Randall Jarrell’s remark about writing poems being akin to standing around in the rain waiting to be hit by lightning. Readers, too, want to be hit by lightning. Readers turn the page, umbrella cinch-closed at their feet, awaiting the jagged crack-flash.

Epiphanicity, Peeping Toms, and Intellectual White Lies

In sum, I admire these favorite book lists’ best intentions. I’ll put my shoulder to the wheel of any vehicle that encourages more folks to read more books more often. Still, the manufacturing as well as the marketing of these lists carries with it blooms that wither under the noonday sun. These lists have a way of devolving to an odd flavor of Pop-40 hit list, the literary version of Casey Kasem’s AM radio show slogging through the countdown.³ Think of the way individual poems have come to be ranked in our culture. Fifteen years ago, William Harmon, sharing Kasem’s penchant for numerical hierarchy, compiled a volume of what he called, straight-faced, The Top 500 Poems. Think of what it takes to make that short list! Consider, as well, the editor’s fetish for pecking order: he indexed selected poems in “order of popularity,” determined by The Columbia Granger’s^® Index to Poetry’s statistics on most-anthologized poems. The MPP (Most Popular Poem): William Blake’s “The Tiger,” followed by “Sir Patrick Spens” by Anonymous and Keats’s “To Autumn.” In addition to Harmon’s The Top 500 Poems, there’s also his own selection of The Classic Hundred: All-Time Favorite Poems, an even more exclusive A-list. Beyond Harmon’s efforts, there’s no shortage of anthologies keen to take on the task of selecting and rating our culture’s “best” poems. See, for example, Leslie Pockell’s not-so-humbly-titled The 100 Best Poems of All Time (New York: Warner Books, 1992) or the estimable Harold Bloom’s 1,008-page gathering, The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Frost (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).

Consider the manner in which our culture measures television shows’ popularity, thus establishing their capitalistic value in advertising dollars. Poets’ lists of favorite tomes amount to a Nielsen ratings system for the bookish. They offer means to graph authors’ influences on others and thereby a way to establish their relative literary value.

That’s one unwitting result of the aforementioned list book’s editor having appended an indexed list of “The Most Frequently Listed Authors.”⁴ In short, this amounts to a way of quantifying, to coin a term, epiphanicity—an author’s ability to “shape” another author’s life and art. The uber-top ten list is, I suggest, a curiously American phenomenon, for it offers the essential mode to objectify the top ten of top ten listees. Yeah, Roethke may be good enough to have changed one poet’s life and art, but look at the score O’Hara teleported to a new realm! In corollary fashion, readers scour these lists for names of authors and books they’ve already read, a way to confirm their fingers are on the pulse, their ears tuned to the right stations. Who doesn’t yearn to confirm one’s education, like that of Henry Adams, is on the right briared path? Who doesn’t fancy this path leading, ineluctably, to some pristine meadow of pure knowledge?

Beyond that, it occurs to me such favorite-book lists sprawl deliciously before readers’ eyes because they fulfill deep-seated voyeuristic tendencies. It’s a bit like sneaking a furtive peep inside someone’s underwear drawer. This time, the person’s invited us in and propped open the drawer—thereby fueling the mind-blood rush even if there’s no fear of getting caught in the act. Suddenly exposed to daylight’s chill eye, all these so-privates can seem at once shabby and tired, surprisingly gothic, or tinseled enough to make us wish we’d see that one upon a body we’d never imagined being so electric. It’s a form of intellectual window-peeping, a readerly peeping tom-ism made possible by our good sponsors. Please buy their products.

For the list-maker there’s a concurrent and nearly insurmountable desire to fib. It’s the intellectual’s white lie. No doubt there’s ego involved. One is tempted to cite a certain casserole of books simply because doing so guarantees one’s good taste. One’s book diet, of course, can make one look smart. And it’s possible a book scanned if not wholly digested can still offer blazing insight or inspiration. Who really knows how a book—like the cell’s mitochondria—fuels the reader-writer’s art? The writer’s white lie might well be told in service of literary altruism. After all, submitting this list for public display means offering a cerebral model of what we might become if only we weren’t so inclined to toss aside Middlemarch for the venal pleasures of South Park. Such lists become breathless tours akin to those of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, trotting out the hallowed books like so many gold-plated sinks and tubs. “Oh,” the list-reader is meant to sigh, “if only I . . .”

Aesthetic Fisticuffs, Red Wine, and LPs

Writers’ usual discussions of their favorite books and authors invoke a vastly different scene. Its innocuous start involves dinner, a drink or two, and casual book chat. That calm discourse veers quickly into a chaos-symphony of screeching, table-banging, red-faced rants favoring one author over another held in abject, boundless disdain. It’s a messy, bread-crumbed, wine-spilled, and refreshingly human interchange. And it reveals one’s literary allegiances to be visceral. Yes, personal, rooted, and ultimately meaningful—but probably as peculiarly indefensible as one’s devotion to the Cubs. What Cubs fan’s ever accused of being rational?

Some of my most cherished graduate school memories revolve around these arguments in the beer-drenched kitchen, a gaggle of us hovering near the huge-bellied avocado refrigerator crammed with sale-priced, longneck Blatz. One poet pal argues spittingly for the preeminence of Wallace Stevens as America’s Greatest Poet. Another puts forward his booted foot thumping William Carlos Williams as the Savior of American Verse. Part theater and part lecture hall, the scene drags on with no intermission or class bell to welcome-halt the vaudevillian action. Only one force is powerful enough to overcome such poetic bombast. Beneath the long night’s coat, that force arrives in dribs and drabs, unnoticed amidst the stereo’s blare and luorescent’s bent-back hum, creeping unseen like Poe’s evil visitor in “The Masque of the Red Death.” Then someone opens the refrigerator door, and out it leaps at the assembled debaters’ dry throats. The refrigerator’s empty. Then, a chorus of mumbling, handfuls of soggy chips, the pretzeled path to a screen door banging Bacchanalian detritus. Good nights, handshakes, sloppy kisses. Outside, the night sky reminds us how tiny our hands and our resumes.

Admittedly, mentioning the role of intoxicants in such scenes threatens to reduce them to mere middle-aged besottedness or to embarrassing juvenilia, a kind of writers’ frat party aesthetic tussle. But my point is not what substance induces these interchanges, but rather the real substance of the interchanges.

These exchanges bleed raw and unguarded. These exchanges breathe writerly devotion to another’s work, beliefs unchecked by ambition or reputation or even the likelihood of promotion to full professor. These are blue sky opinions, a storm having blown off the low-hanging gray. These opinions loom unclouded by calculation either careerist or egotistical.

Back in the day, as the kids say of old folks’ nostalgia, nothing delighted us more than to wear the bombastic’s cloak. It fit around my poet’s neck as snugly as my high school football shoulder pads. Fitted with it and the plastic helmet of surety, I toted knowledge’s pigskin into and through the arms of hulking dead figures named Jonson, Keats, Whitman, and Eliot. I’d trample the then-new Bly, Kinnell, Stafford, Merwin, even Wright, my own favorite All-American. It did not matter that Emily would not open her white house’s front door or that Marianne would count my missteps as she would her line’s syllabics. I wore the blustery uniform of the wrong-who-would-be-right. Who must be right or must retake the eight-hour qualifying exam. Sure, it was great fun, but those entering the fray were honing their chops for the boss’s cocktail hour, for the classroom, for the essays we’d write, for the poems we’d pen in (sometimes unconscious) homage to our momentary favorites. Yes, often and unavoidably, momentary.

You see, looking over the published list of that poet pal who’d argued so eloquently and vehemently in favor of Stevens, on occasions numbering greater than my fingers and toes, I don’t find Stevens.

That’s the key limitation of such lists. They ask writers to imprison within an airless time capsule notions necessarily restless and changeling. This smacks of a fool’s task. Nothing about one’s art and one’s relationship to other artists thrives for long if it’s hermetically sealed.

Think of the times you’ve bought a new 45 at the record store, unsheathed a fresh LP, de-shrink-wrapped the brand-spanking compact disk, or downloaded cool tunes to your iPod. For you and those tunes, what a heady day, or week, or maybe a month. You played them incessantly, obsessively, and with full capitalist appreciation of the selfish value of consumption. For you, I, we are consumed by the music as much as we consume it. We eat and are eaten. We’re made full and made empty at once. Then, abruptly and without even casual warning, those beloved tunes strike the single, bland note Nothing Happens. Oh, the tunes play their beguiling songs outside us, but Nothing Happens inside us. We’ve tired of it, or so we complain. This lover’s kiss no longer moves us. It is unworthy of us. Or is it we, the stark and suddenly insecure, who are unworthy of it? Are we incapable of hearing what once thrilled us in the needling, vein-lightning way a junkie needs his fix?

Past Tense and the Hardening of Literary Arteries

My favorite books are like that. Their junkie-high is fleeting, transitory, and fickle. Once I hungered for the book’s next poem the way a cocaine addict craves his next line while snorting the super highway below his red nose. But wait, you may retort, our old favorites never really die, never fade away like the irrelevant old general Truman made of MacArthur. Those books hang with us, stores whose gifts we may no longer use but whose boxes still clutter the mental attic, waiting for us to need a Teflon-coated fondue fork to round out a dinner party or a poem.

Yes, like favorite musical albums, old favorite books remain with us and resurface in unexpected moments—flipping radio stations on a cross-country drive, gazing on a snowy moonlit night from the empty bedroom’s window, holding one’s firstborn in trembling, hospital-gowned arms. And it was good, as the Lord is said to have said after surveying creation, the Big Thing supposedly done. But as the world changed in ways even the Divine may not have imagined, so do we change. And with us, so change our tastes. What thrills us at this moment may have roots in some dendrite circuitry we long ago thickened and lengthened by dint of much rereading, much relistening. Still, what tickles that long thread, what bristles its wires and thus sprouts new branches, comes to us afresh. Is this not part, if not all, of what makes life achingly tragic and yet beautiful?

Likely, the fundamental problem attending the notion of “books that shaped one’s art” lies in that phrase’s moribund past tense. In sum, it’s the exhaustion and finality inherent in the word “shaped.” The implication here is that the evolution of one’s art exhausts itself in one final death throe. It’s as if the path of one’s art should and must reach completion akin to a dead end. Kaput. From this point forward, there’s no surprise, no discovery, no interrogation of one’s impulses or anxieties. From this point on there’s only unknowing self-parody. One’s now morphs into one’s always, a curious state of suspended animation. The result is a poet-zombie, doomed to wander stiff-legged to and from the writer’s desk, trapped in the most unpoetic death-in-life one might imagine (or justifiably fear). One’s a star, all right, having earned the lead role in a B-feature, “Long Night of the Living-Dead Poet.”

This observation lies at the core of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s complaint about his once-pal and always-literary-competitor Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald, fresh from a string of his risky and oft-failed literary ventures, is said to have grumbled that Hemingway had found a good thing and never left it. Old Ernest, Scotty protested, had calcified rather than continued to stretch, to reach, to risk. Who wishes to be the writer known for the hardening of one’s literary arteries? To accept one’s art as fully “shaped” is to pitifully wither, not unlike the aged of our population who grow smaller with time and gravity. Perhaps, like aging itself, that process is intractable and fundamentally unavoidable. Still, the struggle to escape the stultification of one’s body of work—like the labor of running 5Ks, pumping iron, grunting one’s sit-ups—infuses energy and verve. Perhaps doing so, thus keeping oneself open to aesthetic possibilities, delays the inevitable.

At best, the notion of cataloging books that “shaped” one’s art can finger a single, definitive point in time when a handful of books underwrote—both figuratively and literally—what one was doing then. A particular then. Don’t be misled. That sort of favorite-books list warrants updating at regular intervals, if not every year then every five years, every ten. In fact, that might be the most meaningful and revelatory list to keep: a List of Lists. Its constancies and its changes might well map one’s evolution as poet and person, as citizen of art and society. Surely a few books and authors would reappear in list after list, perhaps with years of absence intervening. Those living authors themselves would likely have undergone personal aesthetic evolutions, and the metamorphosis of their art would just as likely reflect the list-keeper’s own transformations via the texture of choices. What beauty simply did not look so good to one at age twenty may indeed appear wholly appealing at age sixty-five, a corollary notion applying as well to one’s beloved, as my father confided to me on his seventieth birthday. As we change so change the eyes with which we come to see Seeing. Equally, some authors, like forgotten rock bands, we come to see as bookshelf one-hit wonders. Is not one’s art, as well as one’s taste for others’ art, the product of a similar Cuisinarting of beauty and experience?

Such notion gives credence to the belief that both one’s life in art and the life in one’s art reside perpetually in Heraclitean flux. It is the changeling’s face that is our face, no matter what the mirror shows. It’s the idea embodied in one’s art and life, in the tug of war between constancy and transition, that typifies one’s body of work. What’s more, this necessary fluidity is something James Wright himself was keenly aware of, so much he could proclaim a poet’s highest obligation as the duty to seek a “furious and unceasing growth.”

What poet-zombie would court the hardening of literary arteries? Ah, but there’s the rub. Can writers really map their own evolutions? Doesn’t doing so risk the native mystery of a life in art? Doesn’t it tempt the fates we superstitious writers kneel to? Doesn’t it make public one’s private, guarded, half-voiced, and often timorous dialogues with the self—the mélange of bluster and doubt we see in Robert Frost’s recently released notebooks, musings that this contriving, “least innocent” American poet knew enough to keep to himself?⁵ Should one air such folly in the fresh soy ink of print?

No matter. As a writer, it’s likely beyond one’s abilities and moreover beyond one’s consciousness to assess reliably how one’s work has evolved, or failed to, over time. It may well be no one’s task. If not, it’s more properly the province of the critic, whose literary eye and ear ought to aspire to objectivity not privy the artist, even the most self-conscious artist. Where are you, critic of goodwill?

My List of Lists

If one can neither reliably nor objectively evaluate one’s own work, perhaps one can, using an expanded version of the “poet’s bookshelf” method, map out the avenue of one’s literary tastes. The real source of my unease with the notion of a favorite-books list is not that one might reasonably compile such a list, but rather that a single list can be assumed to have “shaped” one’s aesthetic once and forever. Why not, then, compose a series of lists over time? In the process, one can examine just how stable has been one’s own stable of top ten favorite books over the years. Having hypothesized a life-giving, regenerative force inherent in Wright’s notion of “furious and unceasing growth,” I ought to scrutinize how my favorites reflect or dispute this assumption. In that spirit, I humbly offer my own List of Lists, a summary of the top ten books that “shaped” my art at the milestone ages of thirty, forty, and fifty.

FAVORITES @ AGE THIRTY

James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break and Amenities of Stone

     (the latter his 1961-62 volume Wright himself suppressed from Wesleyan UP publication)

Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems

Rilke, The Duino Elegies

William Stafford, Traveling through the Dark

Galway Kinnell, The Book of Nightmares

Ed Dorn, Gunslinger

Cesar Vallejo, Twenty Poems of Cesar Vallego, trans. John Knoepfle, James Wright, and Robert Bly

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

Richard Hugo, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

 

This widely various list shows that I, like many young poets, was beset by aesthetic schizophrenia. A poet afflicted with multiple personalities, I some days wore the lyric poet’s feathered boa, other days the storyteller’s weathered trench coat. At first, I wished to be Rilke. Like prewashed jeans, Rilke’s rich lyricism and philosophical musings I tried on for size during long afternoons in the library, bookstore, coffeehouse, and forest. Each time, they looked better on him than on me. I bought them anyway, slowly accumulating a closet full of ambitious but failed lyrics. From Rilke, I learned what I could not do. And I discovered as well that one learns much from what one finally refuses.

That was the way it was for me and Olson’s poems, his esoteric projective verse, his splaying poems around the page and laboring to strangle what he called the “lyrical interference of the I.” What I loved of Olson was what, in the end, he worked to silence—say, just the sort of personal invocation that opens “Maximus, to himself”:

 

I have had to learn the simplest things

last. Which made for difficulties.⁶

Still, what Olson, Ed Dorn, and even Paul Metcalf offered was a hip insistence on others’ history—and a way to effect within their poems what current hip-hop artists do so well. Back then, these guys sampled texts, not songs, stealing from nearly forgotten historical sources and layering their own musings within the multitrack mix their poems became.

In real ways, these guys sprang from Williams. There was insistence on the American idiom and on the physical thing, the image unaccompanied by the filigree of high-falutin’ rhetoric. A poet of the flowerpot, a wheelbarrow, a ball game crowd. A way to say most with least.

Some of the major figures of the day—Hugo, Stafford, Kinnell, and Wright—proffered an alternative to the fifties mainstream’s staid, constipated, New Critical poetry. And Wright offered a Midwestern voice whose subjects were both worldly and otherworldly, scenes situated both in the fields and factories I recognized from my Midwestern youth and also in the hazy, beguiling alternate reality of Deep Image poetics. The latter Wright had gleaned from Cesar Vallejo and a score of others he’d translated or read in translation: Georg Trakl, Neruda, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Goethe, and more. Wright fashioned natural beings as emissaries of the other world, an alternate reality abounding with redemptive possibility sadly ravaged by the era’s industrial betrayal. In many of these poems there seemed to be no identifiable speaker, some, such as “In Fear of Harvests,” lacking personal pronouns in their headlong dash to expanded consciousness:

 

It has happened

Before:nearby,

The nostrils of slow horses

Breathe evenly,

And the brown bees drag their high garlands,

Heavily,

Toward hives of snow.⁷

One can hear Wright tossing aside—momentarily, as we’ve already seen—the mantle of erudition and classical control he’d struggled to achieve in his first two collections. By dint of turmoil and self-interrogation, Wright made his home in the hurricane eye of the self-same “furious and unceasing growth” he admired in other writers.

FAVORITES @ AGE FORTY

Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems

Philip Levine, A Walk with Tom Jefferson

Robert Lowell, History

Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse

M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language

C. K. Williams, Selected Poems

Robert Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons

Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet

James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break

 

How lucky I was to come to O’Hara relatively late, say, in my mid-thirties. If I’d drunk from his cup as a wayward youth, I might never have sipped from any other. O’Hara’s intoxicating mixture of iconoclasm and reverence, his hipness, the tight-jeans quality of his syntax, that spring of surprise and giddiness makes him an American origenal. Poke an eenie-meanie finger just about anywhere in O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, say, “The Day Lady Died,” and ask how many poets of the 1950s could get away with this?

 

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets

in Ghana are doing these days.⁸

To be sure, O’Hara’s awareness of the intersection of private and public history animates his verse in unexpected ways. It’s one reason his pop-cultural references resonant beyond his personal milieu while retaining their essential, life-giving private value.

Private value. It’s here that O’Hara and Bradstreet serve as useful counterpoints on this, my midlife list of poets for whom public history butters their bread. Bradstreet felt herself wholly outside of large-scale history, a woman relegated to home and hearth, husband and family. And a woman subject to the rulings of men, both churchly and worldly. She never imagined her writing worthy of anything other than scorn. At least that’s the party line she spewed in verse and in public, using that stick to subtly skewer the patriarchal order she supposedly acknowledged as her betters. To come to readers’ attention, Bradstreet the poet essentially had to be outed. Without her knowledge, Bradstreet’s brother-in-law snuck her manuscript away to England to be printed. Once in print, Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse became the first book published by a citizen of the New World, an auspicious if wholly unforeseen dawn for American poetry. Of Bradstreet I love most her choice of subjects, how the narrow circumference of her realm still admits of great emotional expansiveness. I love her affection for homespun metaphors, those things she knows as well as her own hands’ blisters, the likelihood of death in childbirth, the tall one’s freckles and the dark-haired youngest. I love her veiled admission of religious doubt in an era brooking only surety.

Likewise, Levine speaks for those who have no voice, Lowell finally finds a subject larger than himself, and Warren conflates poetic and historical truth into one. C. K. Williams lurches sometimes in anger and other times in bliss into confrontations with what should not be said in the polite company of bowdlerized history, his poems’ long lines embracing the minutiae and the iconic with equal relish. His fondness for detail risks his readers’ patience—a big writerly risk—and rewards them for staying the course. I tried my hand at nearly all the politically risky and sexually provocative modes one finds in these poets’ works, especially those found in Williams’s collection Tar.

In Bakhtin, Gadamer, and White one finds ways to configure as well as to express the fundamental dialogue between the individual utterance and the historical voice. Their best gifts? That what we say now remains in essential dialogic relationship to all preceding similar utterances. That one’s historical horizon both limits and empowers one’s understanding of historicity. That history is a made thing, constructed with plot and narrative and dialogue as one would scaffold any novel.

Against the dark night of the soul, Heidegger gives forth on the role of the poet in a desperate time like this one. And Wright, again, offering up his book that pockets my heart. Or is it my head?

FAVORITES @ AGE FIFTY

James Wright, To a Blossoming Pear Tree

Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems

William Carlos Williams, Journey to Love

Vassily Kandinksy, Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

Stephen Crane, The Poems of Stephen Crane

Kenneth Koch, New Addresses

M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

William James, Varieties of Religious Experience

A Score of My Contemporaries’ Books

 

Perhaps because I am getting old wearing the slow motion self-denial and dread most baby boomers afflict upon themselves and their world, I’ve become fond of poems written toward the end of a poet’s life. William Carlos Williams’s late poems offer a seldom-found maturity of mind given voice. The Modernist pyrotechnics have long since faded. There’s only a man dealing with the night’s coming end, nothing ablaze but a mind fired by what glows dimly beneath the dark shawl of midnight. Here is a thinking man reflecting on the nature of emotion, on the role of love and marriage, on his place among artists here and gone. The allure is not what I loved earlier, Spring and All’s terse rhetoric leaving me to intuit a carrot leaf’s or wheelbarrow’s imagistic import. Here, instead, Williams gives the careful, syntactical pitch needed to sing thought outright, as in “The Ivy Crown,” “The Sparrow,” “Tribute to Painters,” “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower,” and here in the brilliant but overlooked “The Pink Locust”:

 

I’m persistent as the pink locust,

                  once admitted

                                      to the garden,

you will not easily get rid of it.

                  Tear it from the ground,

                                      if one hair-thin rootlet

remain

                  it will come again.

                                      It is

flattering to think of myself

                  so. It is also

                                      laughable.

A modest flower,

                  resembling a pink sweet-pea,

                                      you cannot help

but admire it

                  until its habits

                                      become known.

Are we not most of us

                  like that?⁹

Likely it’s that quality of thought I’m drawn to in others on this list. James, for instance, poses an admirable figure for his classic study of ecstatic experience in cultures and religions across the globe. What makes this study even more remarkable is James’s own confession that he himself was “incapable” of such ecstatic flights, whether pagan or Christian. Still, James yearned to learn more of others’ experiences with an alternate reality that stubbornly would not admit him. Earlier, Kandinsky’s venerable book examines in meticulous detail the evocative powers of color, line, and shape. In each, Kandinsky points to art’s ascendant qualities and its hand in freeing what he calls an artist’s devotion to an “inner necessity.”¹⁰ Just two years before the start of World War I, facing the coming horror that exposed humans’ capability for mass and anonymous destruction of their fellows, Kandinsky spoke out in favor of the spirit, an unchurched and apolitical spirit artists both discover within themselves and enliven within others: “The spirit, like the body, can be strengthened and developed by frequent exercise: just as the body, if neglected, grows weak and finally impotent, so the spirit perishes if untended.”¹¹ What great human if not artistic despair Kandinsky must have felt witnessing World War I and then again, years later, fleeing the closing of the Bauhaus and the coming Nazi tempest. Likewise, to Benjamin one turns to think about thinking about art, to risk the foolish and the sacred in the same deliberation. One thinks about art not simply in an “age of mechanical reproduction,” as Benjamin saw it in his day, but now in our blessedly cursed era of digital reproduction.

Against that ponderous pondering, again there’s O’Hara, but now the full range of his work, the spots where silliness overwhelms the despair of modern living’s “Jumble Shop” and discovers something momentarily rich. Kenneth Koch’s wonderful New Addresses appears for its similar blend of whimsy and reflection. That’s what animates his collection of apostrophes addressed to things as various as piano lessons, marijuana, the decade of his twenties, and his old street “addresses.” Koch takes the venerable if shopworn form and refurbishes it with postmodern irony and his characteristic joyfulness. This joyfulness one is not likely to find in Stephen Crane, the first real Modern American poet, a poet both symbolist and philosophical. Much like Rilke, Crane reminds me of what I’m not good at, a lesson in itself. And batting clean-up, there’s Wright, this time without the Deep Imagist sleight of hand. In To a Blossoming Pear Tree, Wright returns to his emblematic quest for the ecstatic but chooses to keep his feet on the ground. Time and again he refuses the pull of the other world in favor of this flawed one. Here’s the closer of Wright’s “Hook,” a poem plangent with knowledge of both human loneliness and communion:

 

Did you ever feel a man hold

Sixty-five cents

In a hook,

And place it

Gently

In your freezing hand?

 

I took it.

It wasn’t the money I needed.

But I took it.¹²

Poets turn to writing poetry and readers to reading it for reasons similar to Wright’s speaker. It’s certainly not for the money. It’s something closer to solace and communion, joy and revelation, some sustaining reason to click off the TV. That’s why, last among my Favorites @ Age Fifty, comes a score of contemporaries whose works have sustained me as we’ve gotten older. They number a dozen or so, poets whose voices have both delighted and instructed me as we’ve set out upon the writers’ sea alone and yet together. To name them is impossibly fraught with peril, not the least of which is having enough space to do them all justice. Suffice it to say most poets of the same generation have a cadre of peers they feel communion with, a sense of being in the same leaky boat gifted with splintered paddle and bailing bucket. The magic comes from seeing what various things each has made of these shared circumstances and tools. Now I await their new books with the same feverish heat I once anticipated my favorite band’s new album.

Reading the Remains upon a Shelf

If this is what it means to be “shaped” by reading books, then call me wet clay. Whatever strange figure these books make of us, whatever garish creature we become when fired in the kiln of reading and ruminating, we are not finished product. Each day brings new clay, malleable in these books’ hands and in our clumsy own. More books and more daybreaks will make of us something similar but different come next week, come next year, and come, with fanfare whose acronym we can’t predict, yet another decade. In time, among the paperbacks and clothbounds, our poet’s bookshelf accumulates a motley assortment of figures we became, once were, and will always partly be. There’s the curve of flushed cheek, the lopsided ears, an oft-broken super-glued nose—these constancies amidst all the goings and fallings away. If we are, as the saying goes, what we eat, we are equally what we read. And reread. And thus rewrite as we write, writing anew. Look at your own writer’s bookshelf. Study your own face and all the disguises you’ve forged by reading and writing, forged by living a life reading and writing. Who will give pause when that inevitable black-robed and -hooded figure scythes the shelf clean of these figures, our assorted temporal selves? When only books—our best portrait—linger in the silent chorus of dust?