by C K Williams
Since those early books, I’ve tended to bury my political messages, if that’s what they are, deeper into the substance of my poems. I used to think that I began to do it out of a combination of desperation and cunning, and the sense that I couldn’t just attack head on the problems I perceived in people’s political perceptions and actions, that I had to insinuate my own vision more subtly into the reader. But now I’m not so sure about whether I might not have capitulated to the same kind of hopelessness and barely conscious despair that I see around me. So much of what we feel we will for ourselves, we ultimately find was willed for us.
So, again, am I a political poet? I’d say yes, but not enough of one. Never enough. If the poems don’t nearly break with rage as much as they used to, it might be because I’m trying to put more of everything else in them, but my rage and frustration is at least as intense now as it was then.
PROSE POETRY
I’ve tried several times to write series of prose poems, but I always end up deciding that the form doesn’t have enough necessities to generate anything I can believe in. Not having a line to adhere to seems to prevent the language of my poems from being as highly organized as it should be in order for it to have unexpected things happening. I suppose prose is too conducive to “and then, and then, and then . . .”
In French, the prose poem has a lively tradition, although I can’t, in truth, appreciate much of it, except Rimbaud’s “Saison en Enfer” and “Illuminations” and Francis Ponge’s work, some of which I’ve translated. But even Baudelaire’s prose poems strike me as slack and uninspired compared to his poetry. In English, with very, very few exceptions, prose poetry just doesn’t come across.
The poem “The Dog” began as a prose poem, but it had almost nothing to do with what the poem finally became: it dealt with a different experience entirely, and the only thing that linked the two poems was that in both versions there was a dying dog. The poem as prose was a story, an anecdote, which was interesting enough, but when I turned to the poem as verse and applied the formal tension that verse of necessity entails, I discovered other possibilities. In particular, I realized that the experience the poem was recounting had to do principally with racism—the racism that educated, well-intentioned liberal people like me have to discover in themselves—and though it hadn’t been that when I was working at it as prose, it became the poem’s central theme.
Perhaps working in prose doesn’t demand as much linguistic energy as verse does, so the investigations it might be making tend to be shut down before their full implications can be realized.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
I don’t feel there’s an obligation for poets to try to move from a more private audience to a more public. It’s been suggested that my use of longer cadences is a way of trying for more readers, but framing it that way puts an edge on my formal decisions that I don’t feel. “Private” poetry, if that’s we’d call it, is after all a very precious tradition. Some of my poems have public themes, but I mean them at the same time to be lyrics because that’s what I believe the tradition offers and demands. So the question of public-private doesn’t have that much meaning for me.
There is a problem when you’re writing poems that have political themes, which is that they risk becoming polemical, agitprop, propaganda—and propaganda is a different, rather scary and depressing tradition. As far as writing poetry about public events: everybody has two identities, one public, one private. You have an identity as a citizen, and you can have strong feelings about things, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to write poetry about them: you can try to do something in other ways. Do you have to write poems about public issues if you’re a poet? Of course you don’t. When I do write poems protesting war, I don’t ever really believe at heart that they’re going to change anything. Maybe the vague hope is they might sensitize one person who isn’t really aware of what’s happening, or, probably more likely, you might find ways for people who already feel the way you do to articulate what they feel a little better.
REDEMPTION
Do I think poetry is redemptive? Is anything redemptive? Is there redemption? Are we redeemable? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then my answer is yes.
REVIEWS
Like all writers, I suppose, I try to read only the good reviews. A compliment can be helpful if it gives you more confidence because confidence is a good part of being able to go on with all the roadblocks in writing poetry. Unfortunately, you’re generally halfway through a review when you realize it’s bad. I read a novelist saying recently that she doesn’t read reviews because you forget the positive ones in seven minutes and you remember the negative ones for seven years. It sounds very stupid, but I find unfortunately it’s true. So I try to read things about my work aslant. I’m afraid if I look too closely, I might take them too seriously. If someone says I’m lousy then I’ll suffer, and if they say I’m good but say it for the wrong reasons, it’s almost worse. Recently my English publisher told me I’d received a very hostile review somewhere, and I asked him not to send it to me; I didn’t care to read it. I hope from now on I’ll always have the chance to do that.
I remember once a well-known critic who had adopted a young poet and was pushing him and helping him make his career—she just really loved his work. At one point in a review she said, “Now he should write more in such and such a way,” and I thought, “Boy am I glad nobody ever said anything like that to me.” She was the driving force in his career at that point, and for her to say that was really potentially destructive. I mean, what right does anyone have to tell a poet how to shape his soul? Because when a poet changes his or her style, you are really are changing your soul. Another reason not to read criticism head-on.
SCHOOLS
I think it’s always an error to classify the significant poets of any moment as a “school”—it rarely occurs to poets themselves and is usually nothing but the crudest sort of identification. Poets crave company, like everyone else, and we like to be in touch, if we can be, with the poets we esteem, but that doesn’t put us in definable groups. Even the so-called confessional poets were very different from one another; what they shared in their commitment to intimate disclosure was minimal compared to the variety of the poems they actually wrote. Look at Sexton and Plath, who are sometimes considered the Bobbsey Twins of confessional poetry: their poetry is radically different in its vision, its music, its imagery and figuration. If you were to come across their poems without having any preconceptions about them, there’s no way you’d conclude they’re connected in any but the most peripheral way.
The self-defined coteries there have been in our time, like the language poets, I think actually debilitated themselves by their commitment to themselves as a movement. Even if you accept the viability of the idea of a number of poets coming together to encourage each other, self-proclaimed schools always seem to me to be doing things backward, cultivating a media identity before they have a body of real work and proclaiming themselves as revolutionaries before they have a clear sense of what they are rebelling against.
STARTING OUT
I was leaving for my first trip to Europe, and on a whim bought a paperback copy of Eliot’s The Waste Land and threw it into my suitcase along with some novels. I was in no sense an intellectual, and though I’d written one poem, I hadn’t really any notion yet that I wanted to be a poet.
I was traveling with a friend, and one night in Florence he went off somewhere. There I was alone and a bit lonely on the fourth floor of a rather rundown pensione that looked over a square, and I started to read the Eliot book. Then, as I wrote much later in the poem “My Mother’s Lips,” I leaned out the window and started speaking aloud poems—imitation Eliot poems, I suppose they must have been. I went on and on and it was terrifically exciting. I have no idea what I might have been chanting—the phrase “innocent dithyrambs” in “My Motherís Lips” speaks to that: dithyramb as ecstatic utterance, being out of yourself, beyond yourself. And
something like that happened to me. I presume every poet has an experience like that, a moment when you realize that you can speak with a voice that isn’t your own, but in some primitive sense is the voice of poetry itself. Your own voice seems to be doubled, and you feel you’re participating in a larger existence than your own—poetry, that would be, however little you might actually know about it.
Of course things change. When you begin writing seriously the joy you feel has more to do with your speaking in your own voice: hearing yourself speaking in verse or some simulacrum of it is so entrancing that no matter what you might actually be saying it feels significant. In teaching composition, especially to graduate students, who one might say are already addicted to hearing their own voice, a good part of the pedagogical task is to convince them that their voice can be enlarged by learning the tradition and the techniques embedded in it. It’s delicate, because you don’t want a young poet to think his or her own voice is invalid—it can’t be, simply because it’s there—but you do want to convince students that inserting themselves into the tradition actually gives their voices, and their minds, possible resonances they wouldn’t otherwise have.
STYLE
The strangest thing about a style is that it’s both sustaining and self-consuming. The discovery of one’s own style is an incredibly fulfilling, liberating experience for a poet. You have the sense—and it’s quite true—that all of reality, the whole world, or at least the things you care about, become accessible to you.
Problems rather quickly arise, though, because in some sense the task of a style is to perfect itself, not necessarily to be inclusive. And since a vision of personal and social reality is always changing, there’s inevitably a tension between the demands of style and the uses of it. Perhaps it’s more easily seen in the style of an age, which sooner or later will always exhaust itself, become decadent and begin to produce artifacts in which style itself is more important than the real world. Stylistically, poetry can be seen as always moving from the transparent to the opaque, hoping for its formal dexterities to be noticed, its splendors appreciated, and the late work of any literary period can end up as merely style exhibiting itself, showing off.
And the same thing can happen to the individual poet. The greatest poets seem to be the ones who either find ways of altering their styles, enlarging them so that reality doesn’t have to be radically amputated to fit them, or find a grand enough, inclusive enough style in the first place so that they can never be exhausted. Somebody like William Carlos Williams, for instance, could have lived another thirty years and still not have exhausted his style. Eliot, in contrast, stopped writing poetry, I think because he felt he’d used up the style he’d worked out over the years: he couldn’t have gone on writing the way he did. His poetry would have (and sometimes did) become trivial. Once Four Quartets was written, I don’t think he could have done anything more without some sort of extreme shift in his aesthetic, which he actually effected by turning to drama. It might be that his lyrical gift had fulfilled itself. Without finding a new approach, he’d just have been diluted his previous work. It wasn’t that his style wasn’t grand—it certainly was—but it didn’t have within it the potential for change and enlargement, the way Williams’s did or Yeats’s.
SYNTAX
When I began to write the longer poems, I didn’t have any particular thoughts about their syntax; what interested me was that I could work in more extended intellectual units. Once I began to work with these larger packets of meaning, though, syntax interested me more and more, and I found myself experimenting more consciously than I had been with the possibilities of more complicated syntactical structures. Syntax is both a necessity for language and thought and a part of their felicity. Syntax in poetry enacts both. For me, it’s as important as poetry’s more formal aspects.
THE LARK. THE THRUSH. THE STARLING.
I had loved the haiku for a long time; like most poets, I found they were a useful way of learning how image could be generated and implemented. You see differently when you’re in the world of haiku: it’s a precious, unique experience, and I always have a sense of good fortune to have lived in an epoch when they were available.
At the same time, the whole haiku culture can come to seem a bit much. One day I was reading a book of new translations—I forget whose—and it came to me that these clumps of words as poems were just silly, that the translator, or translators, were really ransacking poetic cultures, both Japanese and English, and coming up with seventeen syllable blobs that had nothing to do with either tradition.
And it came to me that what I’d like to do would be to “un-haiku-ize” one of the poets, and I chose Issa not only because his muscular tenderness and resignation appealed to me so much but also because I knew he wasn’t a Buddhist, Zen or otherwise, which I found heartening—at least I couldn’t be accused of affronting anyone’s religion.
So I decided to take the core impulse of several of his haikus and reshape them into English poems that—even though they’d have basically nothing to do with what Issa had intended—would be what I could call poems and that would have none of the fake sanctity so many translations of haiku do. That’s why I call them “Poems from Issa.” They’re not translations, certainly, and not versions: they’re poems that take an image or an epiphany of Issa’s to bring into American poetry. Once I got going, I had a great time. I did dozens and dozens of them, even though I wasn’t sure I’d ever publish them. Then Rosemarie Waldrop asked me to do a little book for Burning Deck, and I realized that a selection of them would work well. I have no idea where all the rest of them are; I guess in my papers somewhere.
TRANSLATING
Translating poetry isn’t just moving from one language to another; you’re translating poetry into poetry, which isn’t at all the same thing. A scholar who has a foreign language presumably will be able to translate any text into English, but translating into poetry almost always requires the special skills of a poet, and these skills often take precedence, strangely enough, over knowledge of the language being translated, something that can sometimes mightily offend critics.
There are many examples of this: the translations Galway Kinnell did of Rilke, for example, are striking, though his German is quite limited. Many of the translations of Greek tragedies in the Oxford series (for which I did The Women of Trachis) were by poets who didn’t have Greek and who collaborated with scholars who did. And of course Robert Lowell, in Imitations, did a number of marvelous poems from languages he didn’t have. You can see this in other languages besides English. A renowned translation of Faust in French is by Gérard de Nerval, who had hardly any German.
There are problems, of course, about the various levels of accuracy that can be used in translating poems, from the literal to what we’ve come to call, after Lowell, “imitations.” And some people have gone even further, doing “versions,” which sometimes can seem pretty close to pure theft, the ripping off of another poet’s inspiration, without giving much attention to the intentions of the original. With Issa, I called my versions “Poems from Issa,” not translations, which made me feel less larcenous.
TRANSLATING GREEK TRAGEDY
When you really get into trying to translate anything, it can appear to be a pretty hopeless project: another word for “translation” might be “failure.” It’s inevitable that any success you do have will be a compromise, and in art compromise is just that—which amounts to failure. Still, translation is absolutely necessary to literary culture, and besides that, it’s great fun and a terrific way to learn about things you wouldn’t otherwise.
With cultural monuments like Greek tragedy, translating can seem like the most outrageous hubris, but once you’re into it, it’s completely absorbing. Technically, the central problem has to do with finding equivalences. Greek verse is based on vowel length, ours on stress, and they’re simply incompatible, so the best you’re going to be able to do is to find approximations that give a sense of how much the original is
determined by the complex satisfaction of conventions; you have to devise a way to convey a feeling of rigor and energy by imposing your own necessities—in my case of rhythm and syntax—on the text you’re developing. Art is really always a working out of the relation between various necessities and the freedom of the mind. I suppose ultimately what I felt was that the most crucial thing at the end is not to simplify.
And you have to maintain a keen sense, when you’re translating something from such a distant time and place, that you’re really rewriting history. What happens in our minds in reading or seeing the play can’t be what happened in the minds of the Greeks. So every aesthetic decision you make—about the choice of a word, the vividness of an image, the conveying of the emotional drama of a scene, and the reasons for it—is, if not a violation, then absolutely an alteration. I’ve been reading Robert Darnton, a great historian and, by the way, a great friend, and that shift from past mindset to modern is one of the things he emphasizes. Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist, someone else I’ve been reading a lot, talks about the same thing happening in cultural studies. Jack Zipes, the brilliant fairy tale scholar, another friend, points out that although fairy tales are assumed to say something about the universal and the timeless in the psyche, commentators are often wrong about the very people who generated the stories in the first place, who hardly fit the definition of “folk.” All in all, translating can seem a rather shifty activity, a bit like grave robbing.