How Poems Get Made

by James Longenbach

  The final prose section shifts from the present to the future tense (“They will bring her money; they will die not having found it out”), asserting that the future will be exactly like the present. And while the final iteration of the refrain returns us to the place we’ve always been (“Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon”), the figure “like dusk” also suggests the opposite of stasis, and one has to wonder if the stasis “Karintha” covets is either possible or desirable.

  Toomer’s Cane and Hemingway’s In Our Time stand among several important books, published in the 1920s, that were constructed from a mixture of different kinds of writing, simultaneously disaggregated and whole. Another was of course James Joyce’s Ulysses, and while Toomer aspired to the condition of lyric, Joyce had epic ambitions: the eighteen episodes of Ulysses are based on eighteen episodes in Homer’s Odyssey. But while these correspondences helped to determine Joyce’s narrative, they more importantly offered Joyce a logic that determined the book’s wildly disparate stylistic experiments. On the one hand, Ulysses acts like an unrelentingly intense exploration of the lives of its characters, but on the other hand, it acts like an elaborately designed verbal confection, its dazzling linguistic surface sometimes threatening to occlude the very illusion of life that it so vividly creates.

  In itself, this tension is hardly unique; like poems, novels are made of words. But the strenuousness with which Joyce inhabits this tension often makes the experience of reading Ulysses feel like the experience of reading a poem, since poems exist in order to foreground such tensions to a degree that other kinds of verbal contraptions, which traffic in other kinds of knowledge, may not. If Ulysses deserves in this regard to be called lyrical, however, it inhabits a lyric structure only sporadically—though it does so at junctures so crucial that the book’s epic ambitions are challenged.

  In the episode that corresponds to Odysseus’s battle with the gigantic one-eyed Cyclops, Joyce’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, is attacked by a myopically nationalistic Irishman referred to as the Citizen. The language of this episode is itself gigantic and shortsighted: this is a description of a man sitting in the pub at which the altercation takes place.

  The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero.

  This playfulness is purposeful. At the climax of this episode, Bloom responds to the Citizen’s openly anti-Semitic taunts with “Christ was a jew like me,” enraging the Citizen. But Bloom is playing a role here, allowing himself to be seen shortsightedly. For while Bloom’s father Rudolph was born a Hungarian Jew, Rudolph converted to Protestantism before Bloom was born; Bloom’s mother was an Irish Catholic named Ellen Higgins, and Bloom himself was baptized first as a Protestant and later as a Catholic, before he married his wife Molly.

  All the characters in Ulysses assume that Bloom is Jewish, and by distracting us from narrative information with the play of language, Joyce allows us initially to make the same assumption. Bloom doesn’t consider himself a Jew, but he stands up for righteousness by embracing the identity conferred on him by his culture: later in the day, he describes his standoff with the Citizen this way: “[I] told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in reality I’m not.” The Citizen’s nationalism would perpetuate anti-Semitism, Joyce suggests, even if there were, in reality, no Irish Jews. The prejudice is perpetuated by the language, and the language of Ulysses seems to have a life of its own, larger than any individual who happens to harness it, larger than any individual whom it names.

  By saying so, I may seem to have come a long way from describing the syntax of lyric poems, but inasmuch as poems by Shakespeare or Stevens have come a long way from Homer, the steps I’ve taken are small. In the third century BCE the Alexandrian poet-librarian Callimachus responded impatiently to readers who expected him to emulate Homer’s epic grandeur—

  The malignant gnomes who write reviews in Rhodes

  are muttering about my poetry again

  —and then defended himself with unexpected tenderness.

  Nightingales are honey-pale

  and small poems are sweet.

  Callimachus, whom I quote in the translation by Stanley Lombardo and Diane Rayor, wanted to liberate the newly named genre of the lyric from the pressures of epic prestige, and his own poems became crucial for the later Latin poets, most prominently Horace and Propertius, who repeated Callimachus’s defense of dilatory songs of love over violent narratives of war. When Campion proposes in one of his songs that “If all would lead their lives in love like me, / Then bloodie swords and armour should not be,” he is expressing his inheritance of this preference for lyric over epic.

  So is the pacifist Bloom when, defying the anti-Semitic Citizen, he champions “love” against “force, hatred, history, all that.” Ulysses concludes not with an Odyssean slaying of the suitors but with the most rapturous hymn to sexual love in our language, a hymn in which the syntax is almost relentlessly paratactic.

  and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

  But if love vanquishes epic violence in Ulysses, it is not without great struggle. In the novel’s penultimate episode, Bloom sits alone in his house, surveying its contents as if it were the contents of his mind. He opens the drawers of his desk. He picks up an envelope containing his father’s suicide note, but does not open it. As he has done many times before, he recites snippets of the note by heart.

  Tomorrow will be a week that I received . . . . it is no use Leopold to be . . . . with your dear mother . . . that is not more to stand . . . to her . . . all for me is out . . . be kind to Athos, Leopold . . . . my dear son . . . always . . . of me . . . das Herz . . . Gott . . . dein . . .

  Das Herz, Gott, dein: the heart, God, yours. Athos: the dog. Bloom is not reciting a lyric poem, but he is giving himself over to the process of lyric knowledge. The discovery he willingly repeats here, the discovery of his father’s death, is not in itself pleasurable; the act of repetition induces comfort. Having survived one long day, Bloom needs to reimagine the next long day, a day that will not be so very different. “That which is repeated has been—otherwise it could not be repeated,” writes Kierkegaard in Repetition, “but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new.”

  It’s in this sense, as I began this book by proposing, that the pleasure of lyric knowledge is not something we necessarily experience only by reading poems. Prose may be the vehicle. Setting the dinner table may become the vehicle when the act of arranging the silverware, napkins, and plates becomes as gratifying as the act of eating. But poems are a more reliable vehicle because they exist not necessarily to be useful (as vessels for information or for food), but to allow us to take pleasure in repeatable actions that may seem, not only on the worst of days but on the best of days, to constitute our uselessness. Everybody needs to eat; nobody needs to read poems, though at certain moments the sustenance provided by the act of reading a poem may feel as necessary as food.

  XII

  POETRY

  Imagine that poems were easy to write. Looking inward or outward, poets would say what they feel and describe what they see. They would produce as many poems as there are moments of insight or observation to be had, and each of these poems would be as obviously pertinent to our lives, day by day, minute by minute, as parking tickets or recipes for chocolate cake. Rarely would we bother to read anyone’s poems but our own, rarely would we read a poem twice; we’d write a new poem instead.

  But of course poems are not just difficult but often impossible to write, especially when insight and observation abound; every
poet knows how it feels to write badly, once having written well. Although a poem may well be provoked by a moment of insight or observation, a poem is a record of its maker’s passionate relationship with the medium, and while that relationship is fraught, like any such relationship, the record is permanently available. A poem is an invitation to return to the site of love.

  The poet’s medium, as I’ve emphasized, consists not only of the diction, syntax, rhythms, and figures of the language in which a poet happens to write. Because the effect of a particular poem depends on the arrangement of these fundamental elements in relationship to one another, the medium also consists of the ways in which these elements have been arranged in previous poems; in this sense, the knowledge we derive from a lyric is inevitably a repetition of what we already know, even if we’re encountering a poem for the first time. “For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew,” said Robert Frost of his experience of encountering a great poem: “I am in a place, a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground.” Anyone might write something that feels like a lyric poem, that makes its readers feel what Frost describes, but we wouldn’t recognize that utterance as a lyric unless we’d first read one elsewhere.

  How then did poetry in English begin? In his eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Venerable Bede tells the story of Cædmon, who late in his life joined a monastery in the north of England. Sometimes at a feast, says Bede, the monks would sing for one another, but when Cædmon “saw the harp approaching him, he would rise up in the middle of the feasting, go out, and return home.” Cædmon was no singer, no poet, though he liked a good feast. Nonnumquam in convivio, writes Bede in the original Latin, sometimes at a feast. When Bede’s history was translated into Old English in the ninth century, before the language contained any Latinate words, the word convivio was rendered as gebeorscipe, which means beer-ship or drinking of beer together.

  One night, Cædmon had a dream in which he was again enjoined to sing something. “What must I sing?” he asked. The dream instructed him to sing of the creation of all things, which Cædmon then did without hesitation. He remembered the poem when he awoke, and for the rest of his life he was renowned for his ability to compose beautiful poems on demand, a new poem for every new day. “He did not learn the art of poetry from men nor through a man,” says Bede, “but he received the gift of song freely by the grace of God.”

  Here is my very loose translation of the Old English poem we’ve come to call “Cædmon’s Hymn.” To make it sound like a free-verse poem in modern English, I’ve introduced some Latinate diction, reorganized the syntax, consolidating its many repetitions, and altered the lineation better to serve this syntax and diction.

  Now must we praise the guardian of heaven,

  His power and his understanding,

  Holy creator, father of glory, eternal lord—

  How he originated every wondrous thing.

  First he made heaven as a roof

  For earth’s children.

  Then he created earth,

  The lord almighty adorned the earth for mankind.

  Even if Cædmon learned nothing from men, as Bede says, what did he learn from his medium? While “Cædmon’s Hymn” was composed in the English spoken in the north of England in Bede’s time, its syntax organized in the four-beat alliterative line typical of Old English poems, the hymn was first written down as Latin prose; offering his translation, Bede cautions that he provides the sense but not the order of the original words. Today, we do possess Old English versions of “Cædmon’s Hymn,” but they were either added to Bede’s Latin text or included in Old English translations of Bede, the translations that rendered convivio as drinking of beer together. In Bede’s history, “Cædmon’s Hymn” is a poem created out of nothing, but on the page “Cædmon’s Hymn” is a poem derived from precedent, the result of one medium giving way to another, just as my translation of the poem is the result of one medium giving way to another.

  Early readers of “Cædmon’s Hymn” would have known about one true act of creation ex nihilo, out of nothing: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” begins the book of Genesis. Advertising the fact that it is made out of something, “Cædmon’s Hymn” repeats this familiar biblical language: God “first created the heavens as a roof for the children of men and then . . . created the earth,” says the poem in Bede’s prose version. We’ve seen that acts of repetition become acts of transformation, however, and while Bede’s version of “Cædmon’s Hymn” says that God created caelum as a roof, using the Latin word meaning both heaven and sky, the Old English versions of the poem use the Germanic word heofon, from which we derive our modern English word heaven. In Germanic English, but not in Latin, what exists in heaven has been heaved there from the earth below. Even if Cædmon were divinely inspired, the medium of the English language made his poem.

  These opening lines of Frank Bidart’s “Genesis 1–2:4” were made near the end of the twentieth century.

  In the beginning, God made HEAVEN and EARTH.

  The earth without form was waste.

  DARKNESS was the face of the deep.

  His spirit was the wind brooding over the waters.

  Every line of this poem is familiar, but no line is exactly like any previous English translation of Genesis: “In the bigynnyng God made of nouyt heuene and erthe” (Wycliffe); “In the begynnynge God created heaven and erth” (Tyndale); “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (King James). Like Cædmon, Bidart has made something out of something, but for Bidart, the something from which he is making his poem has been enriched by an additional thousand years of usage; the medium of his poem includes not only the diction and syntax of the developing English language but the particular ways in which that diction and syntax have been arranged by previous makers into particular sentences. So while Bidart’s “Genesis 1–2:4” may seem like a special case, a poem that only repeats existing language, just as Mark Strand’s “Elevator” may seem uniquely like a poem that only repeats itself, “Genesis 1–2:4” in fact reminds us that all poems are made of words that come trailing the glories of prior usages. To avoid those usages is to distance oneself from the medium, to step away from the site of love.

  “I made it out of a mouthful of air,” says W. B. Yeats in a moment of lyric extravagance. “But the medium of this is language,” says the philosopher Theodor Adorno. Precisely because poems are made of language, which is social, distinctive to no one, a poem never belongs to the poet alone. The poet’s act of submitting himself to the stubborn reality of the medium is paradoxically indistinguishable from the poet’s act of self-expression, says Adorno: “This is why the lyric reveals itself to be most deeply grounded in society when it does not chime in with society, when it communicates nothing, when, instead, the subject whose expression is successful reaches an accord with language itself, with the inherent tendency of the language.” Mostly, poets experience the failure to achieve this perfect accord with their medium, but in a great poem, what is social seems personal, what is derived from precedent feels distinctive, made in the moment. How does this happen?

  The majority of lyric poems I’ve described in this book are written in the present tense. Cædmon: “Now must we praise.” Shakespeare: “When lofty trees I see.” Dickinson: “He fumbles at your Soul.” This selection is representative of lyric poems at large, which are written overwhelmingly in the present tense—so much so that we take for granted how peculiar the lyric’s inhabitation of the simple present actually sounds. When Yeats begins “Among School Children” by saying “I walk through the long schoolroom,” he doesn’t sound like a speaker of the English language: who actually talks that way, describing what he’s doing in the simple present, rather than in the present progressive (“I’m walking through the long schoolroom”)? The lyric present is an artifice that has come to seem natural; it signals that the utterance we’r
e about to experience wants to seem unprecedented, happening now.

  But to sustain that impression a poem needs more than a signal: how does any poem, even a poem recounting past events, sustain the visceral impression that it’s happening now? Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is conspicuously a past-tense lyric; it is also a lyric that, like “Cædmon’s Hymn,” came to its author in a dream.

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.

  So twice five miles of fertile ground

  With walls and towers were girdled round:

  And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills

  Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

  And here were forests ancient as the hills,

  Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

  The dream provoking these lines fulfilled a lyric wish for immediacy: “the images rose up before him as things,” said Coleridge, speaking of himself in the third person. But like “Cædmon’s Hymn,” “Kubla Khan” is made from the medium Coleridge shared with other people: its opening lines are adapted from a seventeenth-century travel narrative (“In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately . . . house of Pleasure”), and, as John Livingston Lowes demonstrated in the magisterial Road to Xanadu, virtually every word of “Kubla Khan” may be traced to Coleridge’s compulsive reading of such narratives.

  Nor does the poem suppress this indebtedness, for as “Kubla Khan” unfolds, its drama inheres not in its story of the creation of the pleasure dome, raised beside the ominously violent river Alph, but in the ongoing creative act of the poet’s negotiation with his medium.

  A damsel with a dulcimer

  In a vision once I saw: