Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour by Wallace Stevens; To You by Langston Hughes; The Waking by Theodore Roethke; In Memory of W. B. Yeats [from Another Time] by W.H. Auden; The Healing Improvisation of Hair by Jay Wright; Our Valley by Philip Levine; An Old Story by Tracy K. Smith;
What makes Walt Whitman so powerful and powerfully embarrassing a founding figure for American poetry is that he is explicit about the contradictions inherent in the effort to “inhabit all.” This is also what makes it so silly to imply Whitman’s poetic ideal was ever accomplished in the past and that we’ve since declined — because of identity politics — into avoidable fractiousness. “I am the poet of slaves, and of the masters of slaves,” Whitman wrote in his journal, indicating the impossible desire to both recognize and suspend difference within his poems, to be no one in particular so he could stand for everyone. You can hate contemporary poetry — in any era — as much as you want for failing to realize the fantasy of universality, but the haters should stop pretending any poem ever successfully spoke for everyone.
Last paragraph of Ben Lerner: The Hatred of Poetry
Refract and recoil and reinforce your love of poetry with Jane Hirshfield's poem, Counting, this New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me Jane Hirshfield
Joy indeed, remains Joy.
Nutshell:
The poems this week were taken from the 30 years of posters created by the American Academy of Poets celebrating April as poetry month. I had included the list with links to the posters and mention of all the poems to which they refer with the poems.
Final Soliloquy: Chosen as poem on the 2010 Poetry Month Poster. Written the year before his death at age 75 (1954), the word "final" takes on a sober connotation as well as insinuating that Stevens embraced a routine practice of "soliloquy[1]",
where his inner self could share private insights. We noted the first word, "Light" is repeated three times as noun and once as verb, the stress on "one", single, a whole, where God and Imagine know no boundary. Who is the "we"? The poet and his soul? Is the "thought" in the 2nd stanza referring to the "world imagined as the ultimate good", which perhaps implies that "ourselves" might be universal, or to the "intensest rendezvous" the line before which refers back to the soliloquy? When he describes us as "poor", is this metaphor juxtaposing our lack, perhaps our hunger, our frozen state to the aliveness of embracing the richness of imagination? Although there may be religious overtones, this is more a philosophical poem exploring ideas of what is involved with existence, essence.
Although highly abstract and of a complexity that leads to bafflement, the poem for many provides a sense of interior peace, beyond the outside world. This interview by Ezra Klein of Michael Pollan on consciousness may be of interest. The conclusion: "we know less after reading than before." But not without expanding the parameters of our understanding! We can joke and say, do you really want to pin anything down, or is it enough to let the poem keep on being the poem, radiating its generous room for possibilities?
To you: Chosen as poem on the 2002 Poetry Month Poster
I believe this link may be Langston Hughes reading. You will see other poems as well, including A Negro Speaks of Rivers (also selected for the Poetry Month Poster in 2002) which came up in discussion.
The reference to Richard Wright and "The Library Card" came up: a true story of being Black and denied library lending in the South in the 1920's. To whom is Langston Hughes writing this? Specifically to black brothers and sisters, or to all dreamers who believe in the "vast horizons of the soul"? We admired the repetitions, the holding of the breath in the suspended first lines ending with "and", the juxtaposition of sit with three different verbs: dream, read, learn about the world... It is the dream that propels us, invites us to help... the action of reaching out, joining in. It has a kinetic energy and one could imagine the choreography of momentum, or hearing it to the background of jazz.
Such a tone of optimism and graciousness! Some saw a parallel with Stevens' Final Soliloquy, the going beyond "our problem world" to join into one "central mind... in which being there together is enough."
The Waking-- Roethke 1908-1963: One many poems listed on the 2006 Poetry Month Poster
The opening of this incantatory villanelle poses a contradiction which because of the form will be repeated several times. How to understand how one wakes to sleeping? Like the first poem, some saw a play between conscious/unconscious, but others imagined the original meaning of the title as a wake, the watch over a body the night before burial, or as one person put it, instead of a vigil, perhaps at a "death bed", a meditation on a "life bed". One could easily read "waking" as "walking". Why the capital G for ground, capital T for tree? People brought up Roethke's struggle with depression, his family greenhouse business and his greenhouse poems like The Root Cellar.
The language with repeated w's (wake, waking, we, what, which, walk, where, who, lowly worm, winding) and l's (learn, feeling, slow, shall, lively/lovely, falls) and slant rhyme of long vowels is haunting yet fluid. The 5th stanza enjambment of the first line gives a big pause between Nature (who has another thing to do) and us (//to you and me) with a delivery of advice which feels encouraging. Another poem which could be danced, or sung in choral response perhaps.
In Memory of W.B. Yeats: One of the many poems listed on the 2006 Poetry Month Poster
This is only an excerpt. For the entire poem: https://poets.org/poem/memory-w-b-yeats
It helps to understand that Auden wrote this a month after Yeats' death and the full poem recognizes the chaos of Ireland spurred Yeats to write poems. "Despite all you wrote, Ireland is still full of chaos and bad weather, since poetry doesn't actually change anything. It lives on in the metaphorical region (of the mind or culture) where it comes from, a fertile area where the powerful would never want to meddle. It flows down like a river from the pasturelands of loneliness and the hubs of sorrow, from painful inner places (and/or fierce communities) that we devote our lives to. It flows on, a process, like speech or the mouth of a river.".
The lines selected are at the end of the elegy, and good advice to fellow poets. Many enjoyed the lines "with the farming of a verse/make a vineyard of the curse."
The Healing Improvisation of Hair: Used on the 2008 Poetry Month Poster
No one could really make "head or hair" of this one.
Following the heels (to heal?) of Yeats, Carl Sandburg's Four Preludes was brought up which starts :
The woman named Tomorrow /sits with a hairpin in her teeth /and takes her time and does her hair the way she wants it / and fastens at last the last braid and coil /and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
In an interview Poet Dante Michaud, says this: " This poem has all the hallmarks of Wright’s poetry—supple lyric: “[A] day so thin its breastbone / shows.” An inhabited eye. In Wright’s poems, there’s often a real observation that transports Wright into the body of a character in his mythopoetic landscape. ...And robust phrasing: “bottom juice,” “the grit of solitude.”
He goes on to mention Jay Wright's response to a student asking why he seemed to be weaving so many different sources together in his poetry: “[It’s] already woven, I’m just trying to uncover the weave.”
Our Valley: Chosen on the 2012 Poetry Month Poster
This poem, from Levine's book News of the World published in 2009 is quite different from his earlier poems about workers in Detroit. We noted the long unrolling of one sentence in the first 8-line stanza. Even the Mountains, have no word for the "something" so massive, irrational, powerful... The next 8 lines increase the grandeur beyond mountains, ocean, to that "huge silence we think of as divine". The final stanza combines eco-sermon and back to the title, it's not about "our" as something we possess, but the way nature determines not just the valley called home, but our life.
An Old Story: Chosen for the 2019 Poetry Month Poster
We noted the formal capitalization of each line and how deftly the poet stops a first word with a period. Terrible. Dream. Passed.
She manages cadences and rhythms with enjambments, alliterations and that solo stanza of 3 words hanging to the right -- A long age -- falling on the word passed. An old story indeed.
Knowing she was National Poet Laureate under Obama, our first African-American President, not just once but for two terms, the first word "we" and the final word, "color" can assume she is addressing both racist assumptions and behaviors since the founding of the United States, but also the universals of being human in terms of how we behave to each other and our planet.
Color as healthy and necessary diversity -- indeed brings up tears of joy, mixed with the deep sorrows when it was gone.
[1] A soliloquy is a dramatic convention where a character speaks their inner thoughts, feelings, or secrets aloud while alone on stage or un-heard by others. It serves to provide direct insight into a character's motivations, or to reveal key plot points, often fostering a sense of intimacy with the audience
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