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In 1939 came the New York World’s Fair. Our family, including my paternal grandmother, took the train from Baltimore and stayed two or three nights at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York, across the street from Pennsylvania Station. We saw the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, spent a day in Flushing Meadows at the Fair, with its Trylon and Perisphere of which we had heard so much. We went to Atlantic City for a day, chewed its saltwater taffy, were pushed in wicker chairs along the boardwalk (a favorite tourist ride in Atlantic City in those days—hard to fathom its appeal to a child). My sister and I had our portraits sketched in pastel by a boardwalk artist. Under her picture he wrote, “Dad’s Pride,” and under mine, “Miss America, 1949.”
It was going to be a long way to 1949. In a month war would be declared in Europe; soon the Atlantic Ocean would be full of convoys, submarines, and torpedoes; in Baltimore we would have blackouts, and air-raid drills at school. I would become part of the first American “teenage” generation, while people my age in Europe were, unbeknownst to me, being transported east in cattle cars, fighting as partisans, living in hiding, sleeping underground in cratered cities. Pearl Harbor would call in the wrath of the United States.
I was keeping a “Line-A-Day” diary and wrote of the World’s Fair: “The greatest part was the World of Tomorrow. Men and women of Tomorrow appeared in the sky and sang.” Some early version of big-screen vision and sound must have been projected on the dome of the Perisphere, celebrating the World of Tomorrow with its material goods, miracle conveniences, freeways, skyways, aerial transport. No World War II, no Final Solution, no Hiroshima. The men and women of Tomorrow marched with energetic and affirming tread. Whatever they sang, it wasn’t the “Internationale”—more like a hymn to American technology and free enterprise. The Depression was still on, the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia only a few weeks away. But the World of Tomorrow—capitalist kitsch—inspired a nine-year-old girl, who, decades later, remembers but one other moment from the New York World’s Fair of 1939: a glassblower blew, over live fire, a perfect glass pen and nib in translucent blue-green, and handed it over to her to keep, and she did keep it, for many years.
•
Mercifully, at last, I was sent to school, to discover other, real children, born into other families, other kinds of lives. Not a wide range, at a private school for white girls. Still, a new horizon.
Mercifully, I discovered Modern Screen, Photoplay, Jack Benny, “Your Hit Parade,” Frank Sinatra, “The Romance of Helen Trent,” “Road of Life.” The war was under way; I learned to swing my hips to “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” “Mairzy Doats,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” I loved Walter Pidgeon and the singing of the miners in How Green Was My Valley, Irene Dunne in The White Cliffs of Dover. I learned to pick out chords for “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “As Time Goes By” on the keyboard devoted to Mozart.
•
A poet’s education. Most of the poetry she will read for many years, when poetry is both sustenance and doorway, is not only written by white men, but frames an all-white world; its images and metaphors are not “raceless,” but rooted in an apartheid of the imagination. In college, for a seminar in modern American poetry that includes no Black (and almost no women) poets, she reads one of Allen Tate’s “Sonnets at Christmas”:
Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
And I must think a little of the past:
When I was ten I told a stinking lie
That got a black boy whipped; but now at last
The going years, caught in an accurate glow,
Reverse like balls englished upon green baize—
Let them return, let the round trumpets blow
The ancient crackle of the Christ’s deep gaze.
Deafened and blind, with senses yet unfound,
Am I, untutored to the after-wit
Of knowledge, knowing a nightmare has no sound;
Therefore with idle hands and head I sit
In late December before the fire’s daze
Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.3
This girl, this student, this poet is only barely learning that poetry occurs in “periods” and “movements.” She is still trying to read the way she always has: in the here and now, what makes you shudder with delight or trouble, what keeps you reading, what’s boring? But she’s hearing about a southern poetry (she who grew up in the city of Edgar Allan Poe and Sidney Lanier) that calls itself Fugitive, Agrarian. Nothing helps her to connect these literary movements with southern history, with her own history. Tate’s sonnet leaps out at her because it breaks, or seems to break, a silence—at very least it seems to point to something under the surface, the unspeakability of which her pulse is tracking as it flickers through the poem. She is studying in New England, now, joking about her southern heritage, there are a few African-American students (still known as “Negroes”) in her classes, she knows now that “segregation” (a name for the laws she grew up under) and “prejudice” (a vaguer notion) are retrograde; the freshman sister assigned to her by the college is the daughter of a famous international diplomat, later a Nobel laureate: a distinguished Negro. She takes her light-skinned, serious “sister” out for lunches and coffee, is supposed to guide her with sisterly advice. How is she equipped for this, in the presumption of whiteness? Some years later, she hears that this young woman, whose unsmiling ivory face and dark, back-strained hair have become a perplexing memory, is a suicide.
Tate’s poem teaches her nothing except the possibility that race can be a guilty burden on white people, leading them to Christmas Eve depression, and (more usefully) that a phrase like “stinking lie” can effectively be inserted in an elegant modem sonnet. Only years later will she learn that the writer of the poem, aristocrat of the world of southern letters, was, at the very least, and as part of his literary politics, a segregationist and supporter of the Ku Klux Klan.
__________
[2003] In his strangely awkward, sometimes incoherent essay, “Remarks on the Southern Religion,” in the Fugitive anthology, I’ll Take My Stand, Tate wrote:
The South would not have been defeated had it possessed a sufficient faith in its own kind of God. It would not have been defeated, in other words, had it been able to bring out a body of doctrine setting forth its true conviction that the ends of man require more for their realization than politics. The setback of the war was, of itself, a very trivial one.
We are very near an answer to our question—How may the Southerner take hold of his Tradition?
The answer is, by violence.
For this answer is inevitable. . . . Since he cannot bore from within, he has left the sole alternative of boring from without. This method is political, active, and, in the nature of the case, violent and revolutionary.4
NOT HOW TO WRITE POETRY, BUT WHEREFORE
Masters. For all the poetry I grew up with—the Blake, the Keats, the Swinburne and the Shelley, the Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Whitman, the domesticated versions of Dickinson—in my twenties a greater ocean fell open before me, with its contradictory currents and undertows. Frost, Wylie, Millay seemed like shoreline tidal pools: out beyond lay fogs, reefs, wrecks, floating corpses, kelp forests, sargasso silences, moonlit swells, dolphins, pelicans, icebergs, suckholes, hunting grounds. Young, hungry, I was searching, within the limits of time and place and sex, for words to match and name desire.
Rilke’s poem, the antique marble torso of Apollo glinting at the passerby through its pectorals like eyes, saying: Du musst dein Leben ändern, You have to change your life.1 Finding J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender’s translations of Rilke in a bookstore in Harvard Square (at first, thinking this Rainer Maria might be a woman). Du musst dein Leben ändern. No poem had ever said it quite so directly. At twenty-two it called me out of a kind of sleepwalking. I knew, even then, that for me poetry wasn’t enough as something to be appreciated, finely fingered: it could
be a fierce, destabilizing force, a wave pulling you further out than you thought you wanted to be. You have to change your life.
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In his editor’s foreword to my first book of poems, published in 1951, W. H. Auden praised my “talent for versification” and “craftsmanship,” while explaining to and of my poetic generation:
Radical changes and significant novelty in artistic style can only occur when there has been a radical change in human sensibility to require them. The spectacular events of the present time [did he mean the revelations of the Holocaust? the unleashing of nuclear weapons? the dissolution of the old colonial empires?] must not blind us to the fact that we are living not at the beginning but in the middle of a historical epoch; they are not novel but repetitions on a vastly enlarged scale and at a violently accelerated tempo of events which took place long since.
Every poet under fifty-five cherishes, I suspect, a secret grudge against Providence for not getting him [sic] born earlier.2
If anything, I cherished a secret grudge against Auden—not because he didn’t proclaim me a genius, but because he proclaimed so diminished a scope for poetry, including mine. I had little use for his beginnings and middles. Yet he was one of the masters. I had read his much-quoted lines:
. . . poetry makes nothing happen; it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.3
Auden had written that in January 1939, elegizing W. B. Yeats. He ended it with a charge to living poets (or so I read it; maybe he was still talking to Yeats):
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.4
But I was growing up in a postwar world where executives were increasingly tampering with everything, not least the valleys of saying. And in that world—or in the sector of it I could perceive around me—both women and poetry were being redomesticated.
•
Masters. In my college years T. S. Eliot was the most talked-of poet. The Cocktail Party played on Broadway at that time; his name and work were already part of student conversations, alluded to in courses. I listened to lectures on The Waste Land, the Four Quartets, earnestly taking notes, trying to grasp the greatness. I came to Eliot’s poetry with the zeal of a young neophyte discovering the new and admired.
I came to it also as a young person utterly disaffected from Christianity and from organized religion in general. My experience of the suburban Protestant Church was that it had nothing whatsoever to do with changing one’s life. Its images and rituals were wedded to a world I was trying to escape, the world of passionless respectability. I wanted nothing more to do with it. But how could an eighteen-year-old girl from Baltimore critique the fact that the greatest modern poet in English (as everyone seemed to agree) was a High Church Anglican? In my lecture notes, penciled on the endpapers of the copy of Four Quartets that I still have, I find: “This = problem of a Christian poem in a secular age—you can’t accept it unless you accept Christian religion.” The lecturer was F. O. Matthiessen, one of Eliot’s earliest interpreters, who one year later, in a suicide note, described himself as a Christian and a socialist. He was also a homosexual.
My Jewish father, calling himself a Deist, my Protestant-born mother, secular by default (as, perhaps, married to a Christian, she’d have been Christian, without strong convictions either way), had sent me to church for several years as a kind of social validation, mainly as protection against anti-Semitism. I learned nothing there about spiritual passion or social ethics. If the liturgy found me, it was through the Book of Common Prayer, mostly the poetry of the King James Bible contained in it. I used to walk home from church feeling that I must be at fault: surely, if I were truly receptive, I would feel “something” when the wafer was given, the chalice touched to my lips. What I felt was that I was acting—we were all in a pageant or a play. Nor was this theater magical. Christianity as thus enacted felt like a theological version of a social world I already knew I had to leave. Sometimes, having to pull away from a world of coldness, you end up feeling you yourself are cold. I wrote this disaffection into an early poem, “Air without Incense.”5
Christianity aside, there was for me a repulsive quality to Eliot’s poetry: an aversion to ordinary life and people. I couldn’t have said that then. I tried for some time to admire the structure, the learnedness, the cadences of the poems, but the voice overall sounded dry and sad to me. Eliot was still alive, and I did not know how much his poetry had been a struggle with self-hatred and breakdown; nor was I particularly aware that his form of Christianity, like the religion I had rejected, was aligned with a reactionary politics. He was supposed to be a master, but, as the young woman I was, seeking possibilities—and responsibilities—of existence in poetry, I felt he was useless for me.
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What I lacked was even the idea of a twentieth-century tradition of radical or revolutionary poetics as a stream into which a young poet could dip her glass. Among elders, William Carlos Williams wrote from the landscape of ordinary urban, contemporary America, of ordinary poor and working people, and in a diction of everyday speech, plainspoken yet astonishingly musical and flexible. But I don’t recall being taken out of my skin by any Williams poem, though later I would work with his phrasing and ways of breaking a line as a means of shedding formal metrics. Muriel Rukeyser, the most truly experimental and integratedly political poet of her time, was unknown to me except by her name in a list of former Yale Younger Poets. I don’t recall the publication of The Life of Poetry in 1949. No one—professor or fellow student—ever said to me that this was a book I needed. And not even the name of Thomas McGrath, the great midwestern working-class poet, was known to me. His chapbooks and small-press editions were not published or discussed by critics in the East; he was himself on the McCarthyite blacklist. Even the Left and Communist journals had trouble with his poetry, finding it “difficult” and unorthodox.6 In fact, I was to discover Rukeyser only in the late 1960s with the poetry readings against the Vietnam War and, soon after, with the rising women’s movement in which she was, late in her life, a powerful voice. I did not read McGrath until the 1980s, when his long historical and autobiographical “Letter to an Imaginary Friend” became available in its entirety. But, in my early twenties, was my life ready for Rukeyser and McGrath? Perhaps not. Yet each of them was asking urgent questions about the place of poetry, questions I had as yet no language for.
•
I was exceptionally well grounded in formal technique, and I loved the craft. What I was groping for was something larger, a sense of vocation, what it means to live as a poet—not how to write poetry, but wherefore. In my early twenties I took as guide a poet of extreme division, an insurance executive possessed by the imagination. But if I was going to have to write myself out of my own divisions, Wallace Stevens wasn’t the worst choice I could have made.
“ROTTED NAMES”
A few years ago, in the early California spring, I put my typewriter, suitcase, and a copy of Steven’s Collected Poems into the
trunk of my car and drove to the town of Twentynine Palms, at the edge of the Joshua Tree National Monument. The town clung along a rough strip, supported largely by a Marine Corps base. Off the main route, behind a bank of pines and oleanders, I found a little motel built around a courtyard with a swimming pool, banksia rose trees, and palm trees. My room had a kitchenette with a table where I could type and read. Daytimes I drove and walked in the desert among the hairy, mad-hermit shapes of the Joshua trees, sat among gray and gold rocks grizzled with lichen, against whose epochal scale tiny lives played out their dramas—lizards, wasps, butterflies, burrowing bugs, red and gilt flies. I stood at the edge of a lake bed, waterless for centuries, a vast bowl rimmed by mountains, brimming with silence. The Joshua trees were starting to open their creamy, almost shocking blooms. It was still cool in the desert through midday. Late afternoons I went back to the motel and sat on the patio—usually empty—reading Stevens straight through, something I had never done before.
I hadn’t been writing poems for a while. I had known I was at the end of a cycle, that were I to write anything it would be a poetry of the past—my own past—that I was unready to write what was still strange and unformed in me, the poetry of the future. It seemed as good a time as any to come to terms with Stevens.
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“I didn’t think much of him when I read him in graduate school,” a younger friend of mine, a political activist and passionate reader of poetry, commented recently. I had started reading Stevens in college, but not really as a student. I read all the “modern” poets I encountered (later they would be labeled “modernist”) as an apprentice, though a wayward one. I picked and chose with sublime pigheadedness what I thought could help me live and write. Never having been a graduate student, I was never compelled to spend hours and days fettered to the explication of works that felt deadening or alien to me. It was another young poet, David Ferry, who told me I should read a poem called “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” and from there I went on, buying the separate volumes as I found them in secondhand bookshops.
Essential Essays Page 28