by Kay Ryan
Nothing keeps the poem from being metabolized. The rhymes button perfectly into their buttonholes. The picture is black (crow) white (snow) and utterly simple. That’s all there is, out in the snow of the empty page.
So it begins sinking into the mind and turning into our own personal shift: how any little surprise can dislodge everything. A bad day can go on forever; release from it is the putting-right of the universe.
It takes such perfect intuition to know to shut up like this, to know that all you have to do is get the crack started and let the crack continue in the reader.
The amount you need to say is so hard to gauge. How much can you not say, and something will still have the charge of the unsaid? There is a point at which what is said is too pale, or frail, one fears, to tip the mind into the unsaid. And the reason for the pallor might not be punctilio but a genuine failure of force.
But there is no failure of force here. Frost does what needs to be done to make his poem work. And if it takes a minor adjustment to conversational phrasing to get the rhyme, he makes it. I mean, no one would say “saved some part of a day I had rued.” It’s not quite speech. Frost goes on and on about the “sound of sense,” but you notice he’ll do what he has to do to make the poem stick in your head. Because above everything else, as he says in his Paris Review interview, “you’ve got to score.”
And back to the idea that the poem doesn’t use any metaphors: of course it is also only a metaphor. If it were just a little Vermont stamp we would forget it. No, it’s the break-line where the welding of the world comes loose.
Reference Back
That was a pretty one, I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.
Oliver’s Riverside Blues, it was. And now
I shall, I suppose, always remember how
The flock of notes those antique Negroes blew
Out of Chicago air into
A huge remembering pre-electric horn
The year after I was born
Three decades later made this sudden bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
To my unsatisfactory prime.
Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.
—Philip Larkin
His old mother hovers about, listening from the hall beyond the bedroom where he has ineffectually barricaded himself with his record player. It takes Larkin just six lines to set the trap.
I always want to laugh at the perfection of these setups. We know this desperate stuckness well from his other poems. There could almost be a Chinese character, one single figure that would mean in all its pent-up intensity, “Larkin’s fix.” He’s always in Larkin’s fix.
He’s such a comically unattractive character. It’s a marvel to me that he exposes himself so mercilessly. Another marvel to me is the sleight of hand that Larkin works on us from inside these suffocating chambers, dumping the emotional contents from stanza to stanza, room to room, mother to son, ear to ear, creating a sense of permeability and interpenetration while at the same time walling the poem up with contrary rhetoric. The effect is classic Larkin: irresistible fluidity completely boxed in.
“Blindingly undiminished” is sophistry. Things were never as they once were; I mean, even when they were, they weren’t. But that doesn’t take a thing away from the fact that these terrible nostalgic gusts (to which we are constantly susceptible) feel true. They are made up by us; they are abetted by the lyric temperament; we visit them and suffer phantom perfection.
The quick flash in the dark created by the phrase “blindingly undiminished”—and extinguished by every other line in the poem—is the breeding reactor for the whole thing. It is such an unbearably intense radiation that only a sad sack like Larkin can wrap it in a sufficient number of wet blankets to make it bearable to us.
Again and again it’s this threatened availability of everything we ever desired that puts the fire under Larkin’s kettles. How could we stand his poems otherwise? Why would we?
Today I feel the opposite of Borges, who wished all poetry could be anonymous, or at least his. I want the human trajectory, the feeling of the personal struggle against paralysis and despair and ridiculousness. I want Larkin to fight in his Larkinness. I want him to sneak through the obstacles one more time.
Something Matters but We Don’t
In man, I can see no substance solidly;
it is as if what we call man were no more
than an oddly angled look at something else.
Or is it my limitation, being man,
not to be able to see whatever is there?
And aren’t these two alternatives the same?
Let me leave off speaking, unknowing as I am,
but not before I speak of the limits of speech,
or tell of man that there is nothing to tell,
or tell of what we discern perhaps there could be
to tell that we know too little except it is there
and, if anything happens, it must be it happens there
and not to us, not by us: good
or evil, it doesn’t matter what we do.
—William Bronk
I was enjoying the grind of Bronk, admiring it this morning.
We are all trying to focus, but we each have a particular distance we care about. Some people are after a granular closeness, some want some middle range. For Bronk, the remoteness is extreme. He’s so hungry to get some faraway focus and he just can’t. All of his poems are these barren tripod marks, where he set up his glass once again, where he tried again.
I don’t know why the evidence of failure should provide consolation but it always does.
#1099
My Cocoon tightens—Colors tease—
I’m feeling for the Air—
A dim capacity for Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear—
A power of Butterfly must be—
The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of Majesty concedes
And easy Sweeps of Sky—
So I must baffle at the Hint
And cipher at the Sign
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clue divine—
—Emily Dickinson
Higginson was right; she is spasmodic. Dickinson terrain is hard on the brain suspension. In any poem of more than one stanza, one stanza is likely to bottom out.
#1099 has several things not going for it. First, I always worry when it looks like she’s going to inhabit an insect. These experiments can go bad in the fey direction. (Recall the “little tippler / leaning against the—sun—”) And here she is in stanza one already sensing herself in the early stages of becoming a butterfly.
It’s a very odd condition, squeezed into a cocoon while also still in her dress—not fey but off-balance and unsettled. She isn’t the one thing or the other quite yet; her condition is conjectural. “Colors tease,” and she feels “A dim capacity for Wings.” So far the picture’s funny and ill fitting and, well, let’s just say so, ravishing: it takes massive poetic wings to think of “A dim capacity for Wings.”
Then stanza two just isn’t very strong, essentially some Dickinson boilerplate to say, Butterflies fly. Of course it is useful for the advancement of her idea, which is that if she is to be a butterfly she must get beyond the cocoon stage. And it does serve the purpose of making a bridge to stanza three, which is the stanza for which I have dog-eared this page in Johnson.
Here she works one of her false-reason tricks, starting the sta
nza with “So,” as though what follows will be the result of what has gone before. As though it won’t be a cosmic leap. As though she cared about those old stanzas anymore. But this is a different plane. By now she is purely addressing the poet’s interior puzzle: How can I move in the direction of what I sense—not as a butterfly, but as a poet?
This is just such a strange capsule of a stanza. I am so interested in her heavy emphasis on clumsiness here, saying it three ways in three lines: she must baffle and cipher and make much blunder if she’s ever going to “take the clue divine.” She’s turning it over and over: the way of the poet is the way of awkwardness and error.
I don’t know if I’m getting across what seems rare to me in this. It’s the exhilarating unworkability of it: one can only blunder into the light, or whatever the “clue divine” is. It’s not gradual, or progressive, or accumulative: you don’t get better or make fewer blunders, approaching the godhead step by step. Blundering doesn’t work, except it does. It can’t lead you there, except it’s the only way to get there. I will go so far as to hazard that blundering might be generative, meaning that rooting around in a haystack long and fruitlessly enough could conceivably breed a needle.
The Poet Hin
The foolish poet wonders
Why so much honour
Is given to other poets
But to him
No honour is given.
I am much condescended to, said the poet Hin,
By my inferiors. And, said the poet Hin,
On my tombstone I will have inscribed:
“He was much condescended to by his inferiors.”
Then, said the poet Hin,
I shall be properly remembered.
Hin—wiping his tears away, I cried—
Your words tell me
You know the correct use of shall and will.
That, Hin, is something we may think about,
May, may, may, man.
Well yes, true, said Hin, stopping crying then,
Well yes, but true only in part,
Well, your wiping my tears away
Was a part.
But ah me, ah me,
So much vanity, said he, is in my heart.
Yet not light always is the pain
That roots in levity. Or without fruit wholly
As from this levity’s
Flowering pang of melancholy
May grow what is weighty,
May come beauty.
True too, Hin, true too. Well, as now: You have gone on
Differently from what you begun.
Yet both truths have validity,
The one meanly begot, the other nobly,
And as each alone glosses over
What the other says, so only together
Have they a full thought to uncover.
—Stevie Smith
Why is this so wonderful?
Because it is utterly headstrong and meant to amuse and gratify her own self, meant to keep herself good company and also to console her, and along the way stumbles into some wisdom.
The most beautiful thoughts and feelings can barely settle or they break us. We can’t endure more than the briefest visitations. That’s the cruel fact. Almost every writer almost always crushes her own work under the weight of thoughts and feelings. Nobody knows how to be light much of the time. Maybe not even the Dalai Lama. Stevie Smith had some natural advantages, a natural distance from conventional behavior.
The only reason it’s bearable to know the things she stubs her toe on is the offhand method of arrival and her chronic throwaway “hi-ho” tone. She sends very hot things through the cooling coils of her poems and plays with them in her bare hands. For of course poems must include hot things; if all the hot things are removed the result cannot be poetry since it is the job of poetry to remain open to the whole catastrophe.
In “The Poet Hin” she manages to say things she utterly means:
1. I am condescended to by my inferiors.
2. Levity contains pain and weight and beauty.
But these heavy matters enjoy the particular weightlessness conferred on the reader’s mind by the assurance that these are the ravings of an individual. The reader of Stevie Smith can never for an instant forget that she is looking through the cockeyes of Stevie Smith. Everything that transpires does so in Stevie Smith’s universe, which is not one’s own. Meaning, none of the sufferings hurt and none of the pronouncements crowd the mind. Instead, they can be entertained; we can examine them as if they were toys although they are not.
There is nothing so freeing as someone pleasing herself.
Work which pleases itself first just snips so many binding strings in the minds of others.
Notes on the Danger of Notebooks
I.
Almost everything is supposed to get away from us.
This is our grief. As a condition, it doesn’t have to be sad. Really, the sadness comes in, the sepia sadness comes seeping in, from keeping what can’t be kept anyhow. Many have wept. Many weep. It is exasperating.
It is also tempting, because it is so easy. It is easy to keep a little notebook, to press a few of the blossoms from an individual spring. Once you start thinking like that, it makes perfect sense to go further, to preserve a representative bloom from each plant from every place and season and year you have known. Each is so beautiful and worthy.
And this is not untrue; but it is hobbling. Yes, exactly as though a great horse were restrained from running and trampling for joy. There is a kind of dangerous piety to it. The powerful lineaments of the mighty horse are all ignored in the cataloguing of one variegated patch of spring.
Cavalier. We must be somewhat cavalier in this rich historical word’s most contemptuous sense. We must run roughshod over what threaten to become memories. For the truth is that memories are indistinguishable from matter in that they can neither be created (despite the claims of vacation brochures) nor destroyed.
You don’t have to worry so much about them, in other words. And you will find that you experience a new availability of energy when you give up trying to preserve what preserves itself. You are relieved of a false and debilitating humility and can enter into a roomier frustration, a more generous appreciation of loss.
For of course it is only within the context of loss that anything can be said to be found. That seems ridiculously obvious, and yet we struggle against it. And isn’t finding, the moment of finding, our supreme thrill? We call it discovery and make much of it, forgetting that it is the gift of loss.
Still, it is as dangerous to cultivate loss as it is to try to stop it through the keeping of notebooks; we are a self-regarding creature and we will watch ourselves losing and become bewitched by our own affecting actions. We are so moved by ourselves. This is natural, but it is distracting. What can we do?
I think we should try to do something, try to make something new, try very hard to write a poem, say; desire very much to articulate something that doesn’t yet exist, something we don’t yet know; try so hard that currents are created in the electric broth of what is not lost but not kept either, currents which draw to the mind the bits of the not-lost and not-kept that join together through the application of great mental force, extreme mental force, in some new and inevitable sequence appropriate to the new realm of the neither lost nor kept. It is incredibly stable when done right.
II.
When Gertrude Stein was at last after so many years of fruitful absence touring and lecturing in the United States, she was a popular sensation in that she was of a piece, a figure round and burrless as a ball, solid, simple, capable of being perfectly, not partially, misunderstood. She could be completely seen and completely heard; she matched herself. Such homogeneity is nearly unbearable for the complicating mind, and the universities where she lectured were full of such minds. After a certain lecture which had as usual bewildered the sober note-takers (the serious people laboring to understand by writing parts down, making decisions about what wa
s important to write down and what wasn’t, seeking a pattern in what was said, attempting to get a fix on it—determining its coordinates like an alien craft’s) a photographer came up to Stein. He was elated, ravished by what she had been saying. It was no trouble for him to understand as it was for the audience which had come with the intention of understanding rather than with the intention of taking pictures for the local newspaper. His ease was no surprise to Gertrude Stein. The photographer had simply listened and therefore he had understood, since what Gertrude Stein was saying was always simple, plus she repeated it. The serious note-takers couldn’t listen and therefore couldn’t understand because they were trying to remember.
The serious note-takers intended to make sense later of what Gertrude Stein was saying, so they needed to remember the main points of her lecture. They would not have been pleased with the idea that they didn’t have to go back to their offices and make sense of it because it already was sense. One might say that they lacked the humility necessary to listen. One might observe that, paradoxically, what appeared to be submissive behavior on the part of the note-takers, taking notes, was in fact arrogance.
But of course the serious note-takers were not worse people than the photographer. The photographer’s humility was no more intentional than the note-takers’ arrogance. The humility necessary to listen cannot be achieved head-on, and that is what gave the photographer his edge. He was partly thinking about getting good photographs—about his equipment, about the lighting. He didn’t have to concern himself with these professional things very much because they were almost automatic, but a little.
This slight distraction, this slight angle that his job as photographer required, along with the feeling that he was not a professional in the area that Gertrude Stein was talking about, made him more open to what she was saying. He wasn’t going to have to summarize her remarks or offer an evaluation. He was just the newspaper photographer.