In Time

by C K Williams

  Being a poet can be very mysterious; you can write for a long time without it even occurring to you that you are one. But at the same time perhaps you have to be aware that when someone reads and falls in love with a poem, that attachment can spill over onto the poet as a person as well, and there might be some responsibility that comes with that. Everyone’s had the experience of reading the biography of a poet and having the person of the poet seem diminished; it can feel like a real betrayal. I remember early on when I was still very attached to Rilke—he was my master, I thought in more than merely matters of poetry—reading a biography that recounted some of his quite reprehensible idiosyncrasies, then finding the same attitudes expressed in his poems, and feeling just that: betrayed. I thought for awhile that his poetry wasn’t important enough to offset all the rest. Though I came back to him—I suppose we always do to the great ones—it was a disturbing experience. With Lowell, at least in his “confessional” mode, I suppose I’d ask whether he was attending adequately to that aspect of the poet’s function, extrapoetical as it might be, or might he have been misusing his identity in order to keep producing poems? At the end, of course, he’s such a great poet that the question becomes a bit moot.

  CONSCIOUSNESS AND STYLE

  Ordinarily we think that a poet has his or her consciousness and that he or she develops a style to enact it. But I might turn that around and wonder whether, rather than consciousness having gone out to search for its stylistic embodiment, the styles we evolve actually allow our consciousness to find new forms, to change. Certainly when we’re actually writing, especially when it’s going well, you can feel that things are happening to you, that you’re not the cause of what you’re writing, that you’re being drawn along, sometimes with exuberance, sometimes with real surprise, and, of course, with gratitude.

  Beyond that, just achieving a poem adds something to the mind that wasn’t there; it becomes an event and an enlarging presence in the field of your thought. These days, for example, I find myself spending a lot of time when I’m at my desk brooding, just sitting there following the flow of my mind, without any particular direction or purpose, in a way I never used to. I suppose the literary word for this is “reverie,” but whatever it is, I’ve been curious about it. My first thought would be that I’m just older now, more “mature,” or that at least my life is less tempestuous than it used to be. But there was a period, at the time I was writing the poems of A Dream of Mind, when my work became more meditative, and maybe those poems taught me a different way of inhabiting myself. Odd thought.

  CONVENTIONS AND DEFINITIONS

  I think that there can be a fundamental misunderstanding of what we mean when we speak of “conventions.” Poetry has always had several dimensions, several purposes, several potentials. First of all, there’s what has always been meant as “art,” what might be called the song, the singing, of poetry. The first poetic conventions developed with this as an aim: what the audience desired, and expected, was to hear the poet sing, hear how the language was being transfigured and exhilarated and made sublime by the poet’s skill. Any information that the poem might impart along with this singing was—is—relatively incidental. Those conventions of poetry are closest to pure music in this sense: we don’t listen to Mozart or Beethoven, or any composer we love, to “learn” anything; there’s nothing to learn from a piano sonata, though we can become almost ecstatic in listening to it. Neither do we expect that an ode by Pindar or a pastoral by Virgil is going to tell us anything about our lives, other than the most basic emotions of temporality and mortality. Pindar is so untranslatable because all he was really doing was singing, and to imagine that we might experience his work anything like a Greek audience did is quite far-fetched.

  The other function of poetry has to do with the meanings it brings to us, the insights and revelations we need in order to live our lives to the fullest. And although the musical element of this tradition of poetry is essential to it, because it’s poetry, not philosophy or polemic, and comes to our consciousness in a different way and to a different place, still, the matter, the information it embodies, becomes as important to us as its singing. This is poetry in the tradition of the epic and the tragic. I think this is where confusion can arise: because so much of modern poetry, really much of poetry since the Renaissance, has its roots in the tragic and responds to the tragic elements of human existence, the enactment of conventions like the pastoral have tended to become secondary, or, perhaps more accurately, they’ve become resources for poetry rather than ends in themselves. Campion and Wyatt and Jonson were well aware of the conventionality of their lyric poems, of the fact that they were essentially creating variations on themes, just as the composer of a sonata or a symphony is quite conscious of contriving a new embodiment of an existing form. I think modernism, and the advent of free verse, reinforced and accelerated the shifting of the greater part of poetry towards the tragic and away from the lyric. It was surely in reaction to all this that the so-called New Formalists gained their fleeting traction a few years ago, though they seemed, at least to me, to be unaware of how crude their characterizations of modern poetry were. They pined for a return to form, meaning conventional metrics, but seemed to pay little heed, or speak little, anyway, of the dichotomies of these more elemental paradoxes of poetry.

  Even the poets who have been great formalists, like Yeats, like Frost, like Larkin and Heaney, have for the most part put their lyric powers at the service of the larger vision of existence they were or are concerned with. Of course you can see the shift in American poetry most vividly in Whitman and Dickinson. Whitman’s case is fairly obvious: he developed a vision of human life and at the same time a music to embody that vision. Leaves of Grass had to be written in the verse he developed for it—it’s inconceivable to imagine Whitman’s amplitude and inclusiveness and fluidity of identity in formal verse. The one formal poem he did write, “O Captain, My Captain,” is embarrassing in its poetic crudity, although, not surprisingly, considering how revolutionary the rest of his work was, it became the most popular of his poems in his own time. You can call Dickinson a formal poet if you like, but her metrics were obviously quite incidental to her: it’s been pointed out often enough how easy it is to reduce the music of her poems to a few set patterns. But she, too, had a powerful vision of the world and of poetry and an absolute genius for figuration and for poetic thinking: the fact that it came embodied in rhyme and meter doesn’t at all situate her in the lyrical tradition, that tradition in which the way the matter of the poem is sung determines how we value it. You could call some of her poems pastoral, but they’re in the pastoral convention in only the most glancing way. She uses the observation of nature, the events of the cycles of nature, as the traditional pastoralists did but for utterly different purposes: her project was to find and configure the shape of consciousness in the world, in the complexities of existence. It’s her intellect that astonishes us as much as her enormous poetic skills: she had a mind like no one else’s in history, and the poetry she uses to configure and investigate this mind is only incidentally related to the ancient conventions.

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN POETRY AND PROSE

  Basically, poetry is language that responds to artificial rhythmic necessities. This has been written about a million times or so, but it can still feel elusive when you try to express it. Poetry happens in a part of the mind that shares our capacity for musical response with our intellect and emotions. It’s a very specialized, and I think not very extensive, portion of mind, which might be why poetry isn’t more generally appreciated: in a sense, you have to go looking inside yourself to begin to respond to it.

  Robert Pinsky has spoken of poetry as taking place in our bodies, as well as our mind—we might say in our voice—and that’s a way of characterizing of it, too. Technically, it’s even harder to talk about, especially, again, in an age of free verse. There’s no question the line between verse and prose has been blurred: some find this offensive, others, like
me, find it liberating: the range of poetry, the function it can play in consciousness has surely been extended by broadening the musical resources available to it. And sometimes poetry resorts to prose in a way that makes them superficially quite indistinguishable. I was speaking with an English poet recently about Anne Carson, about whose work I’m very enthusiastic, and he said, “She doesn’t know anything about the line,” and I replied that she doesn’t care about the line. When you try to analyze her best work, there’s no way you can account systematically for what she’s doing with her music: there are none of the traditional patterns, even free-verse patterns, of poetry to be found in it. And yet it’s terrifically effective as poetry: the naked power of her metaphors, which are what make her work so nearly shocking in its emotional and intellectual profundity, doesn’t need any of the traditional sounds of verse. She organizes her language very cunningly, her sense of the phrase is devastating, and to want her to write differently would be absurd. I’ve never been crazy about the prose poem, at least in English; there just don’t seem to be that many successful instances of it, yet there, again, you certainly don’t want to prohibit it. Some people seem to get riled up about the disorder in modern poetry, the way it keeps redefining itself, violating its own apparent precepts, but you can also think of this as one of its unlikely splendors.

  DISCIPLINE

  The best advice ever given to me was by a painter I knew in Mexico, Tomás Coffeen, an American who lived for a long time in Tlaquepaque, where I stayed for some months. He never became very well known outside of Mexico, but he was accomplished and terrifically dedicated. Coffeen was a great reader, and one day he mentioned something T. S. Eliot had said: that if you’re a poet you have to write poetry every day. Although I don’t think now Eliot actually did that himself, it seemed like a good idea, and I took it to heart, perhaps, sometimes, in down times, to my chagrin.

  Then Coffeen added his own refinement: that no matter what’s going on in your life, you have to keep a certain part of each day to yourself to practice your art, and everyone close to you has to know you’re not available for anything else during that time. I took Coffeen’s advice seriously—I was twenty-six at the time—and I think it’s helped me over the years. I hadn’t felt particularly talented when I started out, and I had no early success to hearten me, so I suppose I decided that the only thing I could do was to work hard, as hard as I could, and if I was talented sooner or later it would show, and if it didn’t then at least I’d be able to tell myself I’d given my all.

  THE DISCURSIVE

  I’ve been struggling over the last years to decide what level of discursive meaning a poem can hold. Of course there are many different ways a poem can mean something; it can move from being almost wholly connotative, in which “meaning” is embodied in the mechanisms of the poem and evoked by them, to being closer to what I’m calling the discursive. It seems our moment of poetry has been almost entirely committed to connotative kinds of meaning, and I’ve been working with trying to push myself towards the other end of the scale.

  I’ve been exploring, at least for myself, how much you can say of what you’d mean in other modes of language, in what we might crudely call the abstract or philosophical mode, while not sacrificing anything of the musical interest I believe poems should have. Poems that are musically very complex, very attentive, don’t on the surface seem to need as high a degree of denotative meaning to be satisfying, but it seems to me that we should be able to put our intellects to use, and our more overtly analytic mental operations, and still have our poems be musically satisfying. Miłosz was the great master of discursive thinking in his poems: the force of his analytic mind combined with his powerful spiritual strivings developed what was an entirely original and, I think, probably inimitable body of poetry.

  EARLY WORK

  Yeats once made a statement that I used to find very meaningful: he said that at eighteen you are who you are, and the rest of your life is basically spent working out the details. In some paradoxical way, I still believe agree with him, but at the same time I find it completely inaccurate in terms of what I’ve actually experienced. I suppose I’m genetically the same person I was at eighteen, I suppose I still have the intellectual capacity I did then—though I’m not even sure of that—but in every other way I’m different. Even at nineteen or twenty, when I first started writing—the rather simple, if very needy kid I was then has almost nothing to do with who I am now. I’m not ashamed of that person, of having been him—it’s like one of those riddles in which you change all the parts of a mechanism and try to tell whether it’s still the article you started out with. I certainly don’t renounce the poems I wrote during those first years of striving, I’m just not who I was then. This isn’t to flatter myself; you naturally lose something as you move out of that period of earnestness, of unabashed and ignorant effort—sometimes I can even long for the innocence that conditioned so much of what I actually lived day by day—but I much prefer the identity my life has evolved for me over the years.

  When I was working at poems back then, I had no idea if I had any gift. Notions like talent or gift at the end just dribble away, though early on they can seem terribly important—the proof is in what you do. All I had when I was young was a kind of blind determination to do the best I could. There wasn’t much reflection, in either sense of the word, because I didn’t really know how to “think” about poetry, because I didn’t know enough of the possibilities of poetry and there wasn’t any but the most tentative feeling of accomplishment. I’d learned already that what you did one day very likely could lose much of its value when you went back to work it again. This can drive you a little crazy. For me it still does.

  FLESH AND BLOOD

  I stumbled accidentally onto the eight-line form of the poems in my collection Flesh and Blood. After Tar was published, I had a number of unfinished poems on my desk, some of which I’d been lugging around for ten years, even longer. One morning, reading one of them, I realized that it wasn’t ever going to be the poem I’d wanted, but that there was one stanza that seemed viable; it was eight lines long, and I worked it into an independent poem. Then I turned to another of the old poems and found another eight-line poem in it, then another. Soon I found myself committed to the eight-line form, and before long I was generating new poems all over the place. I ended up writing a hundred and seventy or so, of which a good proportion ended up in Flesh and Blood.

  I’ve wondered why it happened; I may have needed a break from the longer poems I’d been writing, which demanded what seemed sometimes an inordinate amount of time and patience. Maybe I just wanted to write more quickly for a while. The shorter form seemed to allow me to respond with more immediacy to what was happening around me; I liked the feeling of sitting down and writing a poem from start to finish, rather than always gathering fragments and assembling inspirations.

  After awhile, having a strict form like that seemed to liberate me in a way I’d never experienced before. I was writing poems all over the place, in the street, in cafés: I once found myself writing in my notebook while leaning on the roof of a car. During one of the summers when I was writing the book, the apartment we’d rented in Paris was too small for me to have space of my own, so I borrowed one in a friend’s wholesale fur business. It was an odd place to work, to say the least: the room he loaned me was half filled by fur coats, I had a small table facing a window that looked out into a courtyard, but I was writing in a splendid fury. I’d have lunch with my friend sometimes and say, “I wrote three poems this morning.”

  Occasionally I miss that time; the writing process seemed somehow so seamless. I even think occasionally of going back to eight lines again, but I feel it would be a regression, a synthetic inspiration, which is a contradiction and a danger.

  GOD

  I realize there are a lot of references and addresses to god in my first two books, particularly in I Am the Bitter Name. I felt in those days that a lot of poetry had a sort of conceptu
al politeness about it that omitted a great deal of our actual psychic activity. That’s one of those egomaniacal things young poets can say to themselves—“Poetry is such and such”—without even being familiar with most of the poetry in the world. At any rate, though, I did feel that the way we actually experience, or try to experience, phenomena like god, or the soul, is much rawer in tone and edge than we generally acknowledge in our poems. So in those first books I very consciously tried to formulate a god, and ways of thinking about and addressing him, that would have the simplicity and directness with which children experience such matters, with a kind of primitive emotional frankness and openness. I think when we’re adults we never again experience god in quite that way, as simply him, it, she; as a vivid sensual-mental apprehension, and that’s what I was trying to reenact.

  Most of the conversations or addresses I made to god in those years had to do with various aspects of theodicy: about god’s indifference to injustice, violence, murder—that whole thing. I don’t quite know why, but over the years I’ve become reluctant to talk about the arguments I’ve had with god. Maybe I’ve taken too much of that struggle, if that’s what it is, into the public realm of poetry, maybe I’m just going through a phase about the whole question that is either very private or, possibly, inconsequential, but it feels anyway as though the moral struggles I used to have that included a divinity were crude, even if heartfelt. Maybe a god who’s so much a function of a theodicy argument isn’t a god at all, but a convenient invention.