Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy
Page 11
When Nehru lay dying, he had written out the last verse of Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ [ 33] on a piece of paper by his bed, and kept repeating the lines (‘And miles to go before I sleep…’). Another Frost poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’ [ 31], became America’s favourite modern poem because it encapsulates everyone’s anxieties about the roads we take – or might have taken – in life. Many of the Staying Alive trilogy poems dramatise these kinds of life decisions: the journeys we take, the roads we choose or have chosen for us.
Little-known outside America, Jack Gilbert (b. Pittsburgh, 1925) is a latterday metaphysical poet whose work replays the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, recurrent figures in his books. Gilbert’s poetry bears witness to what he calls ‘the craft of the invisible’, that is, form in the service of his explosive content. James Dickey calls him ‘a necessary poet’: ‘He takes himself away to a place more inward than it is safe to go; from that awful silence and tightening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion.’ ‘A Brief for the Defense’ [97].
Dana Gioia (b. Los Angeles, 1950) is an American writer of Italian and Mexican descent. He retired early from a career as a corporate executive at General Foods to write full-time, was a revitalising chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts for six years, and is now Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. A leading New Formalist poet, he is also a critic and outspoken literary commentator, with books including the controversial Can Poetry Matter? (1992). His highly musical poetry is quietly visionary, often showing human lives rooted in the natural world. ‘Nothing Is Lost’ [94].
Lars Gustafsson is a prolific Swedish poet, novelist, scholar and outspoken social critic, best-known for his novel Death of a Beekeeper (1978). Born in Västerås in 1936, he taught philosophy and literature at the University of Texas at Austin for over 25 years, and now divides his time between Stockholm, Bullaren and Berlin. His poetry registers the metaphysical alongside the mundane with a particular kind of clarity that has come to be associated with his work. Illuminating the potency of ordinary objects and everyday events, Gustafsson addresses critical issues that have concerned great thinkers over the centuries. Asked where he finds his inspiration, Gustafsson replied: ‘I listen. I listen and I look. Creativity knows no rules. You can get an idea for a novel from a little something someone says, or just a face you see. A rabbi once told me that when God spoke to Moses in that bush, it wasn’t in a thundering voice; it was in a very weak voice. You have to listen carefully for that voice. You have to be very sharp.’ [Nordic Reach, XX no.21, 2008] ‘The Girl’ [45].
Kerry Hardie (b. Singapore, 1951) is an Irish writer who has published six books of poetry and two novels. Often following the annual round of rural life, her poetry questions, celebrates and challenges all aspects of life and experience, exploring the mystery of ‘why we are here’, but is ultimately concerned with the quiet realisation that ‘there is nothing to do in the world except live in it’. A number of her poems are narratives or parables in which experience yields a spiritual lesson and consolation; others chart a coming to terms with death or continuing illness and an acceptance of inevitability or flux. Human life quivers in consort with other lives in these seasons of the heart. ‘In many of these poems, illness opens into a compassionate understanding of suffering and death, familial and historical […] she finds in nature a redemptive power for the body, prompting the big questions of human and divine purpose.’ [Selina Guinness, The New Irish Poets]. ‘Sheep Fair Day’ [70].
Seamus Heaney (b. Mossbawn, Co. Derry, 1939) is a world-renowned Irish poet and critic, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Born into a Catholic farming family in Co. Derry, he left Northern Ireland in 1972 and has since lived in America, Wicklow and Dublin. His concerns for the land, language and troubled history of Ireland run through all of his work. His early poetry is notable for its sensory, lyrical evocations of nature and rural life, and of childhood, which has nurtured many of his most memorable poems, as Heaney has acknowledged: ‘My poems almost always start in some kind of memory […] like a little beeper going off in your mind. Some little thing wakens excitement, and it gets connected with some other things. Ideally, it’s like an avalanche – a little pebble begins to move, gathers a lot of energy and multiplies itself.’ from ‘Clearances’ [48], ‘Postscript’ [24].
Turkey’s most celebrated modern poet, Nâzim Hikmet (1902-63), served thirteen years of a 28-year-sentence as a political prisoner, accused of inciting Turkish armed forces to revolt because military cadets had been reading his poems. He was only freed after a worldwide campaign, with protests led by Picasso, Paul Robeson and Jean-Paul Sartre adding international pressure to turmoil created by his hunger strikes. Hikmet’s poem ‘It’s This Way’ [ 108] was written in 1948 from the prison infirmary. Still persecuted after his release, he spent his last thirteen years in exile in Russia. His work was banned in Turkey for thirty years and has been translated into more than fifty languages.
Born in Thessaloniki (then Selânik, part of the Ottoman Empire), Hikmet grew up in Istanbul. After fighting in the Turkish War of Independence, he spent part of the early 1920s in Moscow, witnessing revolutionary politics and influenced by Mayakovsky and the new Soviet poets. On his return to Turkey, he became the foremost figure in the Turkish avant-garde, known for his innovative poetry’s unusual synthesis of iconoclasm and lyricism, ideology and poetic diction.
‘In prison, Hikmet’s Futurist-inspired, often topical early poetry gave away to poems with a more direct manner and a more serious tone.[…] He not only composed some of his greatest lyrics in prison but produced, between 1941 and 1945, his epic masterwork, Human Landscapes,’ wrote Mutlu Konuk. According to Terrence Des Pres, Hikmet’s ‘exemplary life’ and ‘special vision’ – ‘at once historical and timeless, Marxist and mystical’ meant that ‘in his art and in his person Hikmet opposes the enemies of the human spirit in harmony with itself and the earth’. Reading Hikmet, said Carolyn Forché, we are in the presence of ‘a rare guide to the work of remaining hopeful and in love with life, pure of heart and human, passionate and dedicated to the common good’. [Poems of Nâzim Hikmet, tr. Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk, 1994/2002]
Sir Geoffrey Hill is widely regarded as Britain’s greatest living poet. Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, he read English at Oxford. He taught at Leeds University from 1954 to 1980, and thereafter at Cambridge and Boston. He was made Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2010, and was knighted in 2012.
Hill’s densely allusive poetry has earned him a reputation for “difficulty” which he has defended as the poet’s right in the face of cultural disintegration, political opportunism and media-driven mediocrity, arguing that to be difficult is to be democratic and equating the demand for simplicity with the demands of tyrants. His approach to “difficulty” includes subjecting his own lyricism to intense interrogation and self-questioning, as in ‘September Song’ [ 102], an early poem written for an unknown child who died anonymously in one or other concentration camp. Throughout this oblique and understated poem, Hill writes with an acute awareness of how the Nazis perfected the art of misusing language to disguise the nature of their ‘Final Solution’, simultaneously masking and revealing the horror behind that phrase through painful irony, awful double-meanings and juxtapositions (‘routine cries’), so that the meaning of each line changes, or shifts, with each line-break.
Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American poet who trained as a Zen Buddhist. Born in New York City in 1953, she has lived in northern California since 1974, for the past 20 years in a small white cottage looking out on fruit trees, old roses and Mt Tamalpais. Her poems are both sensual meditations and passionate investigations which reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, they celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. ‘The Weighing’ [95], ‘Burlap Sack’ [96].
Miroslav Holub (b. Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, 192
3-98) was the Czech Republic’s foremost modern poet, and one of her leading immunologists. Often employing scientific metaphors, his fantastical and witty poems give a scientist’s bemused view of human folly and other life on the planet. ‘The door’ [19], ‘The fly’ [98].
Langston Hughes (b. Joplin, Missouri, 1902-67) was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. A poet, novelist, short story writer and dramatist, he was known for his vivid portrayals of black life in America as well as for his engagement with the world of jazz. Resisting demands from younger and militant black writers to be a political spokesman, Hughes maintained a belief in humanity and tolerance which ensured that his poetry remained universal in its appeal while staying relevant to the plight of his downtrodden people. ‘Harlem [2]’ [21].
Mohja Kahf (b. Damascus, 1967) is an Arab-American writer who moved with her family from Syria to the US when she was a child. Her interest in morality, gender, politics and how Muslim-American communities relate to others in both religious and secular spheres finds expression in her poetry, fiction and academic studies. Her collection Emails from Scheherazad (2003) draws on the Arabic oral tradition and Arabic poetry as well as American free verse, and includes ‘Hijab Scene #7’ [ 109], one of a series of poems on that theme.
Jaan Kaplinski (b. Tartu, Estonia, 1941) is one of Europe’s major poets, and one of his country’s best-known writers and cultural figures. His philosophical poetry shows the influence of European Modernism, classical Chinese poetry and Buddhist philosophy. Also a linguist, translator, sociologist and ecologist, he lectured on the history of Western civilisation at Tartu University and was a member of the Estonian parliament in 1992-95. His essays on cultural transition and the challenges of globalisation are published across the Baltic region. ‘The washing never gets done…’ [87].
Doris Kareva is one of Estonia’s leading poets. Born in Tallinn in 1958, she studied Roman-Germanic philology at Tartu University. She has published many collections of poetry, her work has been translated into over 20 languages, and she is herself a distinguished translator who has translated the work of writers such as Akhmatova, Emily Dickinson, Gibran, Kabir, Auden, Brodsky, Beckett and Shakespeare into Estonian. Her Shape of Time [ 12] is a book-length sequence composed like a piece of music in three movements. In her introduction to its English edition (2010), Penelope Shuttle writes: ‘Doris Kareva observes the anguish of existence and experience in a style that is pared-back, bone-clean, needle-sharp. Her work has indeed the notation of the music of inwardness, of its despairs and its mediating flashes of illumination. And thus her poetry has its being in a time and place where past, present and future exist simultaneously.’
Jackie Kay (b. Edinburgh, 1961) was an adopted child of Scottish/ Nigerian parentage brought up by a white Communist couple in Glasgow, the background of her first book of poems, The Adoption Papers (1991). Her poetry draws on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding. She has published several books of poetry, two collections of short stories, a novel, a memoir, plays and books for children. ‘Darling’ [117].
Brendan Kennelly is an Irish poet, critic and dramatist who taught at Trinity College Dublin for over 30 years. Born in 1936, he grew up in the village of Ballylongford in Co. Kerry, and most of his work is concerned with the people, landscapes, wildlife and history of Ireland, and with language, religion and politics. Best-known for three controversial poetry books, Cromwell (1983), The Book of Judas (1991) and Poetry My Arse (1995), he is a much loved public figure in Ireland, and a popular guest on television programmes. His poem ‘Begin’ [ 26] was widely circulated by Irish Americans in the aftermath of 9/11, and Meryl Streep chose to read it at the launch reading for the American edition of Staying Alive in New York in 2003. ‘His poems shine with the wisdom of somebody who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and familiarity and wonder of life’ [Sister Stanislaus Kennedy].
Jane Kenyon (b. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1947-95) was an American poet who fought depression and other illnesses for much of her life. Her quietly musical poems are compassionate meditations intently probing the life of the heart and spirit. Observing and absorbing small miracles in everyday life, they grapple with fundamental questions of human existence. ‘Otherwise’ [20], ‘Happiness’ [84].
Galway Kinnell (b. Providence, Rhode Island, 1927) is an American poet whose diverse work ranges from odes of kinship with nature to realistic evocations of urban life, from religious quest to political statement, from brief imagistic lyrics to extended, complex meditations. Many of his poems examine the effects of personal confrontation with violence and inevitable death, attempts to hold death at bay, the plight of the urban dispossessed, and the regenerative powers of love and nature. He is ‘America’s pre-eminent visionary’, and his poetry ‘greets each new age with rapture and abundance [and] sets him at the table with his mentors: Rilke, Whitman, Frost’ [National Book Award citation, 2003]. ‘After Making Love We Hear Footsteps’ [54].
Stanley Kunitz (b. Worcester, Massachusetts, 1905-2006) was a highly influential American poet, editor, translator and teacher committed to fostering community amongst artists. His poetry is autobiographical but also fiercely visionary. Drawing on Jungian symbolism, he engaged with personal tragedy and public conscience to produce a resilient poetry of testing wisdom. His last work, published on his 100th birthday, was The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (2005), a gathering of poems and photographs from the garden he created over 40 years at his summer home in Provincetown, Cape Cod, interwoven with Kunitz’s reflections on poetry, nature, life, death and the creative process. ‘The Layers’ [29].
Philip Larkin (b. Coventry, 1922-85) was an influential and popular English poet, the leading figure in the ‘Movement’ group whose plain-speaking, descriptive poetry using traditional forms was the dominant poetic mode in British poetry of the 1950s and early 60s. His main themes are love, marriage, freedom, destiny, loss, ageing and death. Influenced by Yeats, Eliot, Auden and Hardy, Larkin was a late Romantic lyric poet who evolved a persona suited to his pessimistic postwar outlook on life: dry, sceptical, modest and unshowy, thinking aloud in an apparently commensensical fashion, yet also honest, emotional and capable of rich surprises of thought and imagery. Also a novelist and jazz critic, he worked in Hull in the university library for the last 30 years of his life.
Seamus Heaney calls Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ [112] ‘the definitive post-Christian English poem, one that abolishes the soul’s traditional pretension to immortality’, yet an absence of life after death is as questionable as its presence. Larkin’s poem copes with the eternal subject of death, says Czesław Miłosz, ‘in a manner corresponding to the second half of the twentieth century’, and yet it ‘leaves me not only dissatisfied but indignant […] poetry by its very essence has always been on the side of life. Faith in life everlasting has accompanied man in his wanderings through time and has always been larger and deeper than religious or philosophical creeds.’ Heaney says that in imagining death, poetry brings human existence into a fuller life. [The Redress of Poetry (1995).] ‘An Arundel Tomb’ [64], ‘Aubade’ [112].
Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. His great-grandfather, Yuan Shikai, was China’s first republican president (1912-16). His father, Lee Kuo Yuan, a deeply religious Christian physician, was personal secretary to Communist leader Mao Tse-tung. After they fell out, Lee’s father escaped to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University, but was later imprisoned for 19 months in Sukarno’s jails and in a leper colony, before he managed to escape and take his family out of the country. After a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964, where Lee’s father became a Presbyterian minister. Assisting his father on preaching trips in Pennsylvania was another of Li-Young Lee’s formative experiences. That turbulent background is transformed in his redemptive poetry, which fuses memory, family, culture and history to expl
ore love, exile, family and mortality, searching for understanding and for the right language to give form to what is invisible and evanescent. ‘From Blossoms’ [80].
Denise Levertov (b. Ilford, Essex, 1923-97), one of the 20th century’s foremost American poets, was born in England, the daughter of a Russian Jewish scholar turned Anglican priest and a Welsh Congregationalist mother, both parents descended from mystics. She emigrated to the US in 1948, where she became involved with the Objectivist and Black Mountain schools of poetry, and was much influenced by the work of William Carlos Williams, a lifelong friend and correspondent. Her poetry is notable for its visionary approach to the natural world and to the dynamics of being human. ‘Meditative and evocative, Levertov’s poetry concerns itself with the search for meaning. She sees the poet’s role as a priestly one; the poet is the mediator between ordinary people and the divine mysteries’ [Susan J. Zeuenbergen].