by Donald Hall
It was a lesson, learned in my twenties, that humility is a necessary component of genius.
Richard Wilbur
A poem by Richard Wilbur once appeared on the back of a package of breakfast cereal. “A Wood” decorated the recycled paperboard container of an organic granola called Absolutely Nuts.
When I was a freshman at Harvard, I read in The New Yorker one of Louise Bogan’s adroit and decorous poetry reviews. She praised The Beautiful Changes, a first book of poems by one Richard Wilbur. The name was new to me, and I was stunned by the quoted poetry’s wit, intelligence, and precision. “Tywater” spoke of a soldier killed in the war—Wilbur had been an infantryman in 1944 and ’45, at Anzio and in France and Germany—whose “body turned / To clumsy dirt before it fell. / / And what to say of him, God knows. / Such violence. And such repose.” I crossed Mass. Ave. to Gordon Cairnie’s Grolier Poetry Book Shop and bought The Beautiful Changes. A year later, I met Wilbur when he was a junior fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows. I was twenty, sodden with admiration, and showed him what I was trying to write. In turn he let me see drafts of poems that would appear in his second book, Ceremony.
He died in 2017, at the age of ninety-six, and probably looked about forty-seven years old. Shortly before he died I telephoned him and we spoke for a moment; he still sounded like Dick. His appearance and demeanor had always resembled his work—handsome, formal, warm, wry, as elegant as the curls of his italic hand, and young. His wife Charlee (Charlotte) told me about first meeting his family. When the undergraduate couple parked outside the New Jersey house of Wilbur’s childhood, Charlee watched a young fellow skip down the stairs, dressed in tennis whites and carrying a racquet. It was Wilbur’s father. As Charlee told me, “I knew what I was in for.” She aged like a human being and died in 2007.
A year before Wilbur’s first book, Robert Lowell had published Lord Weary’s Castle, his magnificent, aggressive, iambic pentameter thunderstorm. “Wilbur and Lowell” became the young poets at the center of the universe, in line for Pulitzers, Guggenheims, National Book Awards, the prizes and honors cited in introductions at poetry readings. But reputations soar and crash, flash and fizzle—then sometimes come to life again. In 1959 W. D. Snodgrass walked naked in Heart’s Needle, acknowledging desperate personal feeling. Four years later, Sylvia Plath wrote her devastating poems of rage and self-exposure, then killed herself. Lowell’s work altered entirely, from his majestic Miltonic pentameters to the swift confessional free verse of Life Studies, with “Skunk Hour” that told us “my mind’s not right.” I remembered young Wilbur, years earlier, telling me that he was not about to spill his guts out for anybody. In the heyday of confessionalism, Wilbur’s reticence became grounds for the contempt of the New York Times Book Review.
There is nothing wrong, I hope, in writing out of your own life. If there is, we are not permitted Wordsworth. Earlier, the seventeenth century—the greatest moment of English poetry—rarely provided a display of one’s guts. Milton wrote a sonnet on his blindness, and Henry King’s “Exequy” lamented his dead young wife, but Andrew Marvell was not conducting a courtship. In “To His Coy Mistress,” if we must mention something so vulgar as a subject, Marvell wrote about death, and not the death of anyone in particular. His poem is tetrameter couplets, always octosyllabic, that bow to each other like dandified courtiers, line by line, and within each line by medial caesura—until the poem ends with a monstrous enjambment swooping to an early caesura and a resounding conclusive rhyming terminal image.
But I write about poets, not about prosody.
My undergraduate memories of Wilbur remain most notable. Seventy years ago, he was generous to talk to an incipient poet ripe with ambition and incompetence. I brought him the draft of a blank verse poem I considered finished. Wilbur praised it but gently noted that it didn’t end. (I went back to work.) Meanwhile he showed me handwritten new poems as he made them, and the way he worked astonished me. He showed me stanzas under the title “A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness” (a sentence from Thomas Traherne) that mocked and entertained asceticism. It began, “The tall camels of the spirit / Steer for their deserts . . .” When he first showed me the lines, they occupied half a page—twelve lines and a fragment, inked by a Bic, in complex rhymed stanzas with lines of differing lengths—and stopped midstanza, midline, at a semicolon. Wilbur was stuck. For a month or two, whenever I dropped by, I asked about the progress of his tall camels. They remained silent and motionless in Arabia Deserta. One day he handed me the completed poem, twenty-eight lines on the same piece of paper, continued in pencil after the blue semicolon, no word crossed out. This beautiful poem—deft, clear, witty, complex in thought, rhymed and measured with Wilbur’s superlative art—took only one draft, done over months. I expressed my amazement. He told me he did a lot of walking up and down.
E. E. Cummings
Only once did I lay eyes on E. E. Cummings. (People are cute and write “e. e. cummings,” but the signature printed on his Collected Poems is “E. E. Cummings.”) He was judging an undergraduate poetry contest, listening to half a dozen Ivy League competitors, and his face never looked as if he heard anything. He was sullen, unsmiling, dour—possibly because he was judging an undergraduate poetry contest.
Tom Clark and the Lower East Side
Tom Clark was the best student I ever had. As a senior at the University of Michigan he wrote a forty-four-page paper about the structure of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, replete with Chinese characters—Tom’s back hurt from carrying Chinese dictionaries—and Greek, neatly ballpointed. What he wrote was not the last word—the last word will never be spoken—but his paper went further into Pound’s structure of improvisation than anyone else had done.
Fifty years later, Tom’s poems are strong, short, plain, and never worked-over. After Ted Berrigan died, Tom wrote a brief elegy which I praised. Tom told me it was “the usual fifteen-second poem.” Tom has written many books of poems, many prose books about baseball. In 2006 Coffee House Press published a three-hundred-page selection called Light and Shade, beginning with a poem I have loved forever.
Like musical instruments
Abandoned in a field
The parts of your feelings
Are starting to know a quiet
The pure conversion of your
Life into art seems destined
Never to occur
You don’t mind
You feel spiritual and alert
As the air must feel
Turning into sky aloft and blue
You feel like
You’ll never feel like touching anything or anyone
Again
And then you do
Tom is first a poet but also a painter, and one of his paintings makes the cover of Light and Shade. He draws graph-paper lines on photographs, then identical squares on canvas, which he fills with color. When we last read poems together, in San Francisco, 1989, Tom hung a painting on the wall behind us, an oil of Marilyn Monroe stretched out in languor. Fifty-one percent of the audience was not amused. Returned to New Hampshire, I commissioned Tom to paint a portrait of Reggie Jackson for Jane, who was a baseball fan. Two decades after her death, Reggie still hangs laughing and triumphant in her vacant study.
When he graduated from Michigan, Tom won a fellowship to a Cambridge college where he worked with Donald Davie, a professor and poet friend of mine. (Davie wrote me that Tom was the best student he ever had.) Later, in Paris, at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Tom found a magazine—wittily titled Adventures in Poetry—assembled by second-generation New York School poets, including Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett. In England Tom had been dropping acid every other day, and now he undertook a new obsession. He emigrated to join the East Village and its poets: Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, Anselm Hollo, Joe Brainard, Peter Schjeldahl, Anne Waldman, Larry Fagin, and . . . you haven’t heard all these names? The editor of The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse suggests that minor poets tell you
more about an era than major poets do. It’s possible that these poets are not so minor as Andrew Marvell. A book dealer tells me that in the rare book market they are hot.
The second generation of New York poets, after Ashbery and Koch and O’Hara, began when Ron Padgett emigrated from Oklahoma first to Columbia University and then to the Lower East Side. When Padgett was still in his Tulsa high school, he edited a poetry magazine that inspired Ted Berrigan, an army veteran temporarily in Oklahoma on the GI Bill. Ted left Tulsa for Manhattan with Ron, Kenward Elmslie, and Joe Brainard. This group made magazines like the Adventures in Poetry Tom had discovered in Paris. Along with other East Village publications, it was mimeographed on legal-sized white paper, the pages stapled together.
Ron and Ted together brought out a book called Bean Spasms. Joe Brainard wrote I Remember, a long poem, followed by I Remember More, and more, and more . . . “I remember chicken noodle soup when you are sick.” These poets’ public space was St. Mark’s Church, where they did frequent and multiple readings. Anything could make an East Village celebration. Ted Berrigan’s wife was Jewish, so Ted held a Seder. Some of us drank Manischewitz, others a generic dry red. Joe Brainard was an artist before he became a serial rememberer, and illustrated the poems of his friends. Another artist to the gang was George Schneeman, who sent me the annual gift of a Schneeman image bearing a pasted 5-cent year-by-month calendar. Over my Glenwood range, I nail a red-checked shirt wearing 1968’s lumpy January on top of eleven further months. In the bathroom I hang two of George’s collages, four inches by six, one foregrounding the white-hatted Old Dutch Cleanser icon. Once I watched a squad of East Village poets gather to frame George’s collages, passing around aluminum struts and cardboard mats.
In 1969 Tom Clark, Ted Berrigan, and Ron Padgett flew to Ann Arbor for a three-headed poetry reading. On campus in those years, performances of poetry filled up cafés and warehouses and rectories. Elsewhere were happenings, teach-ins, Poets Against the War, fucking in the streets, marches on Washington, acid, pills, and the Pill. I was between marriages, hanging out with students who tried to convert me from bourbon to pot. Before the three-headed reading the East Villagers toked me a cigar joint, and on our way to the auditorium we stopped at a pizza place for supper. It was the best pizza I had eaten in my entire life.
When Jane and I moved to New Hampshire, Larry Fagin and his girlfriend visited us and sat on the living room rug, gazing with open mouths at the TV set above them. I bump into East Village poets even today. When I see Peter Schjeldahl’s elegant art criticism in The New Yorker, I remember a squalid splendid flat on the East Side. Not long ago, I ran into the best poet of them all, Ron Padgett, when I read my stuff in Vermont, where he spends the summer. Padgett is a superb translator of French poetry, but he is not only a translator. In Poetry Yasmine Shamma reviewed Ron’s eight-hundred-page Collected Poems. Mostly I am too feeble to lift the book, but early in the day I struggle and manage.
Poetry’s young new editor recently told me in a letter that he had just bought two poems by “old Tom Clark.” Ted Berrigan was the East Villager I knew best after Tom. One term at the University of Michigan I arranged a teaching job for him. I won’t forget his arrival at the English Department’s September cocktail party. His hair flowed past his shoulders down his back, and above his red corduroy pants a bright yellow shirt billowed under a sumptuous green velvet vest. Tenured professors wore three-piece gray flannel suits while the department chairman stared at Ted aghast. Ted stayed for a while at my house, in a room upstairs, and when he moved out he apologized. “Sorry I took your pills. They made me great poems.”
James Wright
In my mid-twenties, editing poems for the Paris Review, I scouted the best younger poets by reading literary quarterlies. Especially I looked for poets as young and as new as me. In 1955 I wrote James Wright soliciting his work. He sent me a bunch for the magazine, and our friendship began. After many letters exchanging many poems, Jim and I met in the flesh at a Modern Language Association conference when both of us were looking for university jobs and our poems were largely unknown. At a hotel bar we were drinking beer when an acquaintance of mine dropped by. I’ll call him Zach. He is long dead, and I remember only his repeated shtick. I introduced him to Jim the poet, and Zach stuck out his hand while he transformed his face into a visage of extravagant awe. “I, I know . . . I know . . . your work!” Jim fell for it, like all of us.
Jim died when he was fifty-two. A few years later I introduced his posthumous complete poems, Above the River, talking about the work that I loved and about Jim’s scattery life—poetry, depression, the army, college, depression, marriage, prize-winning poems, fatherhood, depression, alcoholism, divorce, emptiness, remarriage, depression, early death, unforgettable lines and stanzas. Drunk or sober, exuberant or depressed, Jim was always passionate about literature. He knew page after page of Dickens by heart. When he taught at the University of Minnesota, on weekends he often took a bus three hours to a tiny town called Madison, at the edge of South Dakota, where Robert and Carol Bly lived without electricity or running water. Robert edited The Fifties, which became The Sixties, and for one issue The Seventies, while he translated Neruda and Trakl and constructed his own inventive, dreamlike poems. In his magazine he promoted expressionist, almost surrealist work, while Jim was still writing crafty, straight-shooting, metrical quatrains. Jim understood from Robert that his work was old-fashioned.
The Blys encouraged Jim’s visits, but Jim could be an annoying guest. He drank all night, taking part in literary argument, and in the morning forgot everything said. Carol Bly was one of nature’s practical jokers. Robert came from Norwegian farmers, and dinner had to include three food groups. Beef was expensive, so Carol made meatloaf using Pard—canned dog food. She dealt with Jim as inventively as she did with Robert. In the winter Jim slept in the sub-zero chicken house, and woke to stand over the Blys’ wood-burning kitchen range thawing out his removable teeth, frozen in a tumbler. One summer night after Jim fell asleep, Carol slipped into the chicken house and substituted for Jim’s dentures century-old false teeth, yellow fangs wobbling from faded gray vulcanite gums, which she had found in a junk shop. In the morning Jim mumbled, “I thought I had slept for a hundred years . . .”
After several years of visits to Madison, Minnesota, Jim’s The Branch Will Not Break appeared—free verse with extravagant images and metaphors, a manner or strategy suggested by Spanish and Latin American modernists. Image and narrative leapt from topic to topic, illuminating the one by contrasting the other. I think of his “Lying in a Hammock . . .” After a visually exact chronicle of the natural world, the poem ends, “I have wasted my life”—and we see how he said what he meant. His imagination expanded before our eyes, even by way of a line break: “I would break / Into blossom.” Learning from Bly, doing Bly better than Bly, Jim shocked the poetry universe with his new work, his best work.
Afterward, now and then, Jim sent me an old-fashioned, reasonable, narrative, metrical poem. “Don’t tell Robert,” he said.
Jim stayed with me in Ann Arbor when we were both between marriages. We sat across from each other talking and drinking. I noticed something wrapped on the table beside Jim’s chair, and with my usual bossiness told him, “Eat your sandwich.” Obediently he unwrapped it and spoke in mournful measure. “Every morning I wake with a cold hamburger beside me.”
III
Necropoetics
every five years or so, a national magazine publishes an essay proclaiming or lamenting the death of poetry. All my life, on the other hand, I have explored the poetry of death. Now, as I read so much about dying and palliative care, my thoughts always slide back to my wife Jane Kenyon’s leukemia and premature death. Between us there was such a radical difference in age. We almost avoided marriage because her widowhood would be so long, and today it is twenty-two years since she died at forty-seven—while I approach ninety.
When I was a high school freshman and decided to write p
oems my whole life, Jane was minus five. She finished primary school in 1957, when I took a teaching job in her hometown of Ann Arbor. With me came my wife Kirby and my son Andrew, my daughter Philippa arriving two years later. The marriage crumbled and broke after a decade, and I endured wretched years of booze and promiscuity. To our endless good fortune, Jane and I found each other and, in 1972, entered the judge’s chambers. Three years later I quit teaching and we moved to New Hampshire. My children as they grew up came east for education and remained here as our neighbors. In my twenty New Hampshire years with Jane, everything in my poetic history happened again, this time to Jane: her first poem printed here, her first poem printed there, her first book, her second, an NEA fellowship, her third book, a Guggenheim, her fourth book. Multiple poetry readings followed her publications, as her reputation elevated and spread.
When we knew for certain that she was about to die, she told me the whereabouts of unpublished poems, and I read them for the first time. They were dazzling, and I faxed them to The New Yorker, which afforded her poems their biggest audience. When we heard back a few days later, Jane’s eyes were open but she couldn’t see. She had stopped speaking, but her oncologist said that she could still hear. I told her that Alice Quinn was taking seven poems for The New Yorker. If you are never going to see or speak again, what do you think when you hear such a thing? Not much.
