In Time

by C K Williams

  On Being Old

  A novelist friend of mine published an essay a few years ago called “On Being Beautiful.” I was inspired by her to try a similar title, one that might hearten me to be as frank as she was. Although a few readers grumbled about the possible vanity implied in my friend’s words, she is indeed beautiful, as I am indeed old.

  I remember the first time I was referred to in print as a “young poet”—it happened just about the time I thought I’d moved into early middle age. For some reason poets continue to be called young for a both gratifyingly and irritatingly long time, then you’re not anything in particular, and finally you’re referred to as . . . well, like me, old—or worse, elderly, a word that seems to have lurking in it various horrendous decrepitudes. So I’ll begin by noting that the hardest part of being old is admitting to yourself you actually are. That sounds more aphoristic than I mean it to be: the truth is it’s a duel, a savage battle. Ten or a hundred times a day sirens wail to remind you that for a minute or two you may have forgotten you’re seventy-something and that you’d better face the fact more realistically. Except there are no instructions as to how to do this: you just know you’re kidding yourself if you slip into the benign indifference to passing time we’re allowed to enjoy most of our lives.

  The rest of aging, at least so far, isn’t as bad as it might be. My body hangs together pretty well—the only time it’s a bother is when I happen to catch sight of myself in a mirror, especially late at night after too much sight-clearing wine. The upsetting thing then is how in its softenings and sags the body looks simply stupid. It doesn’t understand the way it once did how important a personage it’s lugging around—otherwise it wouldn’t dare appear in this gnarled disguise.

  It occurs to me to wonder how some of my poet heroes would have looked undressed when they were old. One of the ones I most admire, Robert Frost, I actually met when I was twenty and he was eighty-three. I had a little fling with his granddaughter and had the chance to spend some time with him. I was so awed that I had no idea what to say to him; I just watched. Physically, by then his face was like a sculpture of itself: something in the public rather than the private realm. His granddaughter I might add was my first critic. I’d just begun to write and had never shown a poem to anyone but a few nonpoet friends. She’d read a lot of poetry, and when I read a poem to her, the second I’d ever written, she said, “That’s awful,” and I knew she was right.

  Which is another thing about looking back from so far: wondering how it all happened to happen. I remember the first time I wrote a reasonably successful poem, but not what I’d had to learn in order to write it. I had an inspiring teacher in college, Morse Peckham, who was then just writing a book on the close reading of poetry, and I learned at least how to read a poem from him, if not how to write one. I also got to know the great architect Louis Kahn quite well: he was a fanatical worker, and I took from him how dedicated you had to be to your art. I came a little later to meet some poets around my age, who taught me a lot. But it still remains a genuine mystery to me how I ever spun a competent poem out of so much snarl.

  But I was speaking of the time before all that, when I was subjected to Frost’s granddaughter’s painful appraisal. I survived that, and worse over the years, but one of the benefits of having lived this long in poetry is that one comes, gratefully, to feel quite distant from the theatrics of criticism. Even if I might still squirm a bit from jabs at my work, I’ve attained a certain equanimity—except, I should add, when it’s clear that a critic hasn’t read my poems carefully, or at all. That can happen surprisingly often, and still makes my teeth grind. Mostly, though, it’s hard not to perceive the sheer absurdity of the stance of many critics, the way they assume they’re more intimate with the genre about which they’re commenting than mere practitioners. Certainly critics “know” things, sometimes quite well, but the conviction some have that what they know is more germane to the production of poetry than the poet can be irksome, to say the least. This is almost never the case when poets write criticism. The greatest poet-critics, like Auden, Heaney, Mandelstam, and Brodsky, always inform their considerations with an awareness of how difficult is the accomplishing of poetry, and how hard it is even to think fruitfully about it.

  Young poets, in contrast, can be pretty obnoxious about it all. The poet friends I mentioned above—one of whom had already at eighteen published a book, the fact of which woefully intimidated me—had a sincere passion to protect the world from what they considered bad poems. Danger! they’d cry. Don’t even look! You might turn to poetry stone! I never could share their fervor and contempt, not because of anything I can call generosity but because I didn’t have the confidence to be that certain about anything. I still mostly don’t—I’ve become over the years more and more conscious of the vagaries of taste.

  How shifty a thing taste can be, how shitty, even one’s own. I tremble to remember the poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, I dismissed out of hand, whose greatness dawned on me only later. Then there are poets I once admired and who opened ways through thickets for me, but whose work now I find clumsy and shiftless. I think we all tend to believe we can see through the vagaries of our moment to some absolute standard of judgment—this must be a characteristic of human consciousness itself—but the conviction is absurd. So, I never blab anymore about poets whose work doesn’t or no longer moves me. But there are, however and thank goodness, poets the power and force of whose work once nearly knocked me down with delight and envy, and still does, so that when I read them again I feel again like an apprentice. About whom here’s a poem:

  WHACKED

  Every morning of my life I sit at my desk getting whacked by some great poet or other.

  Some Yeats, some Auden, some Herbert or Larkin, and lately a whole tribe of others—

  oi!—younger than me. Whack! Wiped out, every day . . . I mean since becoming a poet.

  I mean wanting to—one never is, really, a poet. Or I’m not. Not when I’m trying to write,

  though then comes a line, maybe another, but still pops up again Yeats, say, and again whacked.

  . . . Wait . . . Old brain in my head I’d forgotten that “whacked” in crime movies means murdered,

  rubbed out, by the mob—little the mob-guys would think that poets could do it, and who’d believe

  that instead of running away you’d find yourself fleeing towards them, some sweet-seeming Bishop

  who’s saying SO-SO-SO, but whack! you’re stampeding again through her poems like a mustang,

  whacked so hard that you bash the already broken crown of your head on the roof of your stall.

  . . . What a relief to read for awhile some bad poems. Still, I try not to—bad, whackless poems

  can hurt you, can say you’re all right when you’re not, can condone your poet-coward

  who compulsively asks if you’re all right—Am I all right?—not wasting your time—

  Am I wasting time?—though you know you are, wasting time, if you’re not being whacked.

  Bad poems let you off that: the confessional mode now: I’ve read reams, I’ve written as many.

  Meanwhile, this morning, this very moment, I’m thinking of George Herbert composing;

  I see him, by himself, in some candlelit chamber unbearably lonely to us but glorious to him,

  and he’s hunched over, scribbling, scribbling, and the room’s filling with poems whacking at me,

  and Herbert’s not even paying attention as the huge tide of them rises and engulfs me

  in warm tangles of musical down as from the breasts of the choiring dawn-tangling larks.

  “Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane . . .” Whack! “The sweet strains, the lullings . . .”

  Oh whack! Lowell or Keats, Rilke or Wordsworth or Wyatt: whack— fifty years of it,

  old race-horse, plug hauling its junk—isn’t it time to be put out to pasture? But ah, I’d still

  if I could lie down like a mare giving birth, arm in my own u
terine channel to tug out another,

  one more, only one more, poor damp little poem, then I’ll be happy—I promise, I swear.

  It’s not only one’s taste that changes over the course of one’s life. In the early years of my literary education at university and just after, there was a vogue for myth, folklore, primitive religion, preliterate song—The Golden Bough, The White Goddess, Technicians of the Sacred, all that. The poets and intellectuals I knew then weren’t much interested in history, or only insofar as it manifested in poetry and art. Wars, revolutions, social movements, evolving or regressive: all were peripheral to the seriousness of what we thought of as our larger interests. Looking back now, I see those thankfully few years as a distraction from the real world in which I was living. Because about then in America, the civil rights movement dawned, then the Vietnam War was launched, and though such historical upheavals could be enriched by thinking of them in a context of collective unconscious and all that, you could no longer pretend to think seriously about or write about the world without a knowledge of society and history, real history.

  Of course, one’s own life takes place in history and generates a history of its own. For a poet, this can be difficult. It’s very hard to grasp realistically the trajectory of your own writing life in relation to the world around you, mostly because you’ve been so preoccupied with the daily, monthly, decadely obsession of writing poems. And then there are times these days when the niggling question surfaces of whether one might actually have written enough poems.

  In a sympathetic and intelligent (the second word devolves directly from the first) review of my last book, the poet-critic ended his otherwise favorable observations by remarking that he found the book a third too long. Of course I disagreed, and besides, how many books are there about which something similar couldn’t have been said? But still, I wondered whether there might be a model the writer had in mind that my book had violated. And, even more discomfiting: if there’s a model for how long a book of poetry should be, might there be a template for a career in poetry? Is there, as the insurance companies put it about medical expenses, a lifetime limit on the number of poems one is allowed to write?

  Then there’s that old expression, “something to say.” Might one come to a time when indeed one might have nothing more to say? At the same time, did one ever really start a poem with something to say? William Carlos Williams once published a book called I Wanted to Write a Poem, and before Williams became one of my masters, I despised its title, so much so that I wouldn’t read the book. In the muddle of my misguided ideals, I believed you weren’t supposed just to want to write a poem: poems were meant to germinate from and enact some urgent philosophical or spiritual intuition—their actual composition was somehow incidental to that larger purpose.

  I don’t know how long it took me—I suppose fortunately not all that long—to grasp that writing a poem—writing a poem—was what everything was about. To be a poet isn’t to distill ideas, however grand, into verse language; rather, in the simplest terms, to write poetry is to sing. And the task of the poet is to learn to sing, then to do it, then learn it again, and do it a little differently . . . Of course you do realize as you go along that the song is most compelling when it embodies issues beyond poetry that are crucial to you, and perhaps to others.

  The question of whether I might be inflicting poems on the world, though, is less trying than convincing myself that it’s worth the effort to write another poem. Writing poems is hard work. Not writing them is even harder. No wonder one comes to think: Why bother? Why am I doing this? Then: what have I done with my life? Written poems? Written poems when there was so much to be done in the world that needed greater doing? But wait, isn’t this the abiding question of lyric poetry, the poetry of an “I”? Who am I, thinking about temporality, mortality, beauty, or death? Who am I, falling in love? Who am I, wandering through the world with nothing much to do, like Whitman, whose work shows you can make yourself and the world and other people monumental by strolling around without much to do?

  But in the worst moments, this doesn’t relieve the galling sense of repetitiveness and futility. Sometimes it’s easier to convince myself to keep at it by thinking of painters or musicians who just seem to do what they do with no fuss. Monet, in his hoary old age tottering out to his garden or pond to do one more painting. Or Titian, in his ancientness still working. That’s what you do, that’s all. You paint another painting. Or if you’re a musician you write another sonata, or symphony, or whatever. The Japanese painter and printmaker we know as Hokusai gave himself thirty different names during his lifetime. In his seventies he referred to himself as “The old man mad about art”—that’s heartening; I like that. It was also around then that he projected a life for himself in which at a hundred he would finally learn how really to paint, and then, he said, at a hundred and thirty “every dot and stroke I paint will be alive.” He died at eighty-nine.

  In my daily life, though, none of this woolgathering is very useful in revealing what my next poem will be. Yeats wrote, in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “I sought a theme, and sought for it in vain.” And that’s it exactly. It used to be that “themes” came tumbling from all directions, you just had to get out of the way. But now . . .

  And what makes it even pricklier is how quickly I can fall into a funk when nothing is happening at my desk. This isn’t anything new: my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jon Galassi, who’s also a good friend, tells me I’ve been complaining in much the same way for the nearly forty years we’ve known each other. Lately, though, I think I’ve figured out where my desperation comes from.

  I used to believe what I thought was a metaphor about writing poetry: that it’s addictive, like a drug. But I understand now that composing verse is actually, not metaphorically, addictive: there really is a kind of rush, to use the addicts’ term, when you’re generating or revising a poem. Busy the mind is, scurrying this way and that, spinning and soaring, and, as is apparently the case with stimulants, there’s an altered experience of time and of the self as it moves through time—I’m sure other poets know what I mean by this. And they must know, too, that when one isn’t working on a poem, doesn’t have any poetry work to do, there are real withdrawal symptoms. In my case, I fall into something like depression, and as in other depressions, I begin to doubt, to ask questions I shouldn’t, about my work, my life—all I grumbled about just now. Goethe put it succinctly: “The poet’s requisite trance is the most fragile element in his armory.”

  The other realization I’ve had recently was that some of this, paradoxically, has to do with the years I’ve practiced my craft. I’m more efficient now when I work; it doesn’t take me as long to make decisions about a poem, to revise or reconceive it. This is all well and good, and I certainly won’t complain, except that my proficiency leaves me with more time on my hands to suffer the absence of the excitement of poetry labor. I sit and stare, I close my eyes, I read other people’s poems or don’t, it doesn’t matter. Of course reading great poems, especially for the first time, has its own addictive thrill—it’s almost as good as going at one’s own work—but there aren’t all that many great poems that after all these decades haven’t already found me. So it can be a relief when a friend sends me a poem to make suggestions about—at least I’m doing something.

  One thing that does keep me going in the end is change, the sound of my poems changing: their tone, voice, velocity, general shape. Knowing how or why these changes come about I’ve always found impossible to describe: they just happen, and I tag along. After my most recent book, Wait, I found myself writing poems unlike any I’d written before. There seemed to have arrived in them an element of not only the irrational but also the absurd, a willed goofiness that for some reason pleases me. “Whacked” is an example of this. Maybe I’m tired of being logical, rational, lucid, “mature.” I knew all along I was never any of these things: sanity was always a kind of armor I donned before I went into the fray o
f composition—and of life, too, I suppose. When I hit seventy or so, it came to me that I hadn’t changed a bit since I was eighteen—Yeats once said something similar—or even since I was twelve. I often feel as chartless as I was then, meandering through the world without much definite sense of direction. As a kid that was mostly okay, until the tornado of adolescence whirled me into the mind I had to live with for the next fifty years, when I finally landed where occasionally I can relax and be myself again.

  “Being oneself.” Isn’t that the most absurd phrase? As though there’s a choice? In the life of art, though, every day can feel like a choice. Who am I today? Am I a poet today, one who might write a poem? Or am I that clod who dared cultivate the desire to string words together in a poetic way? So, again: Will I finally be myself today? Or is today’s “myself” the same poet who wrote with certain musics until now, and will I have to write in those musics, which may by now be utterly tedious, again?

  It may well be that the self I am today just doesn’t want to make the same damned noise. Maybe that noise has become boring. How do I change it? Do I invent a different poet? Do I study the music of different poets from those I’ve known? Don’t I know them all? Besides, if the poems do change, as I say mine recently have, is it really because of some choice? Have I ever chosen the music of a particular poem? Isn’t it always rather that the music of the poems seems to choose me? Which me? A choiceless choice.

  All right: after all the poetry business, how can an old man speak of life without coming sooner or later to death? Dear death, our faithful lifelong companion. But before I consider death itself, it would be cowardly not to confront the worse-than-death. I mean the other, more dreadful fates that lurk in one’s quickly diminishing future: the horror shows of dementia, amnesia, aphasia, even the mostly unremarkable memory loss, the last of which already afflicts me, leaving me occasionally stricken with embarrassment before people I know well whose name all at once isn’t there.