by Kay Ryan
We Met at the End of the Party
We met at the end of the party
When most of the drinks were dead
And all the glasses dirty:
“Have this that’s left,” you said.
We walked through the last of summer
When shadows reached long and blue
Across days that were growing shorter:
You said, “There’s autumn too.”
Always for you what’s finished
Is nothing, and what survives
Cancels the failed, the famished,
As if we had fresh lives
From that night on, and just living
Could make me unaware
Of June, and the guests arriving,
And I not there.
Or perhaps I underestimate the dead woman, and she felt the whole thing.
But look how a poem, the presence of this Larkin poem, opens a contemplative space in the air, how it releases the newspaper reader from doom and emergency (the failed and famished) into some kind of suspension and balance of forces.
Really, we have here regular old Larkin, morose, losing out, fearing death, and using that exact stuff: he has appointed a poem with furniture so right, and just enough of it, that we can move around forever sensing a symphony all around us.
All the Nothing
1.
Oh
the sumac died
it’s
the first time
I
noticed it
Why in the world should that give me the lift it does?
Well, it has nothing to do with Williams’s larger intentions for it as an illustration of “American Idiom and the Variable Foot,” which I have never found very interesting. For me, it has exactly to do with thinking of it as the whole thing, not a little bit of something longer.
Things inside other things have to take their place, jockey for position, exist in relation. With long strings of things, one thing must fade that another can brighten; the eye moves on. It’s the built-in sorrow of serial attention, enfilades mowed down.
Taken alone, these lines keep their brain shock, which mimics the shock of first noticing something outside us. Our attention is complete and undivided. We notice, say, that the sumac—which would have taken some extended period of time to die—has died. So at the same time that the brain is acknowledging that the sumac is dead it is compressing the whole (lost) narrative of its getting dead.
To acknowledge something new is to be engaged in catch-up; the mind rewrites with impossible speed what’s been going on. The way this defies time matches how creation works; Mozart apparently composed concerti in an instant; something that would have to be played out in time took him no time; all the notes were stacked right on top of each other. It’s impossible and true at the same time.
So it’s all the nothing around the dancy little arrangement of regular English that does it all the good. All that nothing is what allows the mind to focus. All the nothing gives the mind the gift of Just This, the paradoxical vacation of perfect attention. Because it is vacationlike to actually pay attention. Your world is relieved of clutter for a split second. You collect like a snowflake around this single bit of informational grit: Oh, the sumac died it’s the first time I noticed it.
It looks like a poem about a sumac and death but it’s a poem about the mind and the fresh slap of perception. Or rather, it isn’t about perception, it gives us a pleasant tiny slap of it.
2.
How much can you take away? It’s always a question. Or maybe it’s exactly the wrong question, posed like that. If you think you are taking away, then you probably are—diminishing something. You have to be looking for something, feeling for the contours of the thing inside the distractions, trying to add just a little bit more to what you know.
But it’s interesting to see what happens, just through the process of isolation. Isolation is a very simple form of “taking away.” You don’t simplify, say, the salt shaker by taking away its details; you take the regular salt shaker away from its kitchen and set it alone against white. You abstract it.
Things taken alone are instantly strange and liberated from usefulness. This doesn’t cause the mind to perceive the salt shaker separate from relationships, since the only way the mind knows anything is through relationships, but it changes the points of the relationship; the mind is incited to hook it up by different points, to connect the salt shaker to itself (the mind seeks to possess) in ways that seem aesthetic because the aesthetic is the not-useful, the beautiful. Removing something from usefulness also removes it from time, suspending it in the white time of the mind.
So when Williams abstracts a single observation—Oh, the sumac died—the result is predictably paradoxical. It looks like it matters that it’s a sumac, but because of this extreme detachment, the way one thing has been cut out of the fabric of life and isolated, specificity works in a different way from usual. It doesn’t matter at all that it’s a sumac.
The poem has worked the way the brain works when it suddenly knows: it is thoroughly focused on the new thing to the exclusion of all else; it knows with inexplicable suddenness (after having not known) and it backfills the story.
Because this little poem is about how we perceive: the brain suddenly knows that the sumac is dead. In a split second it recovers the event it was oblivious to. It knows what it missed. Dying is a process, but in this poem we come in at the end so the process occurs backwards.
It’s a jolly poem about the slap of fresh knowledge, any knowledge. So what if it’s death here. It flushes the mind.
Listening to Williams
Listening to this old recording of William Carlos Williams reading at the 92nd Street Y made me think again about the whole question of voice and where it resides: is it on the stage or on the page? I must confess a predisposition to the page.
Certainly when you read Williams on the page it feels like you’re hearing him. As Kenneth Rexroth says, “his poetic line is organically welded to the American speech like muscle to bone.”
But what that means is, this sense of American speech—of language on the streets—is coming from things Williams is doing on the page. Much of the power, for example, comes from the loose, staggered arrangement of his lines, the kind of air and scatter it catches.
The poems feel blown around. Some of my favorites have nearly been blown away. We sense this terrific freshness and immediacy when we read Williams; we hear this arrestingly authentic, direct voice. It’s such an interesting paradox: we can see a voice; we hear through the eyes. But I think that’s the way it is, really, with poetry: I think poetry’s voice happens in the reader’s head. The voice need never pass over anybody’s actual physical vocal chords. I could imagine that some of Emily Dickinson’s poems were never said aloud. And come to think of it, what voice could be their mental equal? The best poet’s best voice is never transmissible outside of individual skulls, and that’s fine by me. The poet speaks to one reader at a time, forever.
And here’s a further mystery to ponder: the language in Williams’s poems feels authentic, wicked straight up from the pool of mid-twentieth-century American life. But if that were really so, the language would be dated in the way that DeSotos are dated; it would just be interesting for collectors.
But that isn’t the case; poetry draws from its time, absorbs and uses the available language, but it does something to it, something that takes the ephemeral out of it. Since that’s its job: it has to last. It’s a spectacular trick: lasting poetry, in some more lasting way than ephemeral speech, sounds like ephemeral speech. You can test this, even in translation. Catullus is always shockingly bright and immediately alive across languages, giving us the sense of the ephemeral.
As a young reader, I was bewitched by how Williams’s poems relish the interstices and make no place more vivid. And how they do this by doing almost nothing:
Between Walls
the back wings
of
the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle
It seems utterly obvious that we have to read a poem like this; it is nothing spoken.
It’s the lines on the page that put the air in it and Williams’s excisions of words and punctuation that relieve it of gravity. If we were to hear Williams’s voice, it would be in the way of Williams’s voice.
Still, I wind up interested, and grateful, for the recording. We sense his years and his sweetness, his irrepressible enthusiasm, his desire to connect with people, his lack of a defensive or polished surface. And we hear the clear warmth of the 92nd Street Y’s audience in response. It would have been a pleasure to be there that night, in the physical presence of a modern master.
But—I despair of his delivery. He mangles his poems, hesitating, clustering phrases oddly, faking emphasis as though certain words had been underlined! and he had to really! say those loudly! He robs them of their lightness and their gravity. He runs over them in his car.
But fortunately they are written on paper, and there they go right back to full vitality, as he himself has presciently described in his lovely poem “The Term”:
The Term
A rumpled sheet
of brown paper
about the length
and apparent bulk
of a man was
rolling with the
wind slowly over
and over in
the street as
a car drove down
upon it and
crushed it to
the ground. Unlike
a man it rose
again rolling
with the wind over
and over to be as
it was before.
Con and Pro
1. Walt Whitman
I have promised myself not to go back and look into Whitman or I’d be cheating, since I’m supposed to be writing about a writer I don’t read. Also, if I did I know that I would be undone, drawn in, persuaded. That is one of the problems with reading great writing: you can lose sight of the fact that you really don’t like it. It takes a long time to retrieve yourself. I feel that it is essential to operate exclusively on prejudice here.
I guess I could say I don’t read Whitman because I don’t need Whitman’s big stride, his wide, encompassing arms, his hug. The poets I go back to are not at all welcoming. I don’t apparently like to be welcomed. My poets are a dryish people. Lonely, and what of it. They do not gather round the campfire. My poets don’t cherish even the illusion of ease and camaraderie; they do not laze and invite their souls; their souls are much too aggressive already. What their souls need is a little discipline, thank you.
We may make our choices about what poets we continue to read according to how we’re attracted to their body type. Body of work, that is. When I think of Whitman I think of bulk. Page after page of the same poem, rectangle after ripe rectangle of self-delighted self-examination, undulating in the hot wholesome American breeze like sections of Kansas wheat. There is a chain of stores in the Sacramento area whose name translates this agricultural metaphor of numbing abundance into today’s urban landscape: Big Lots!, the chain is called.
I like skinny-bodied poets, the stringy ones who don’t impress the boys on the poetry beach. Nobody is tempted to take steroids and pump up their own poetry mass after they read these poets’ work. Let’s admit it, Whitman just begs to be followed: whatever is true of me is true of you also, dooming us to an ever-broadening band of self-fascinated brothers, even if some are sisters.
To my mind, poets should discourage the practice of poetry, by example. Poetry should seem hopelessly, inimitably beautiful, dependent upon a touch you’d have to be born with. And preferably it should pounce and clean your bones quickly, rather than boil you for three weeks the way Whitman does.
2. William Bronk
I love to open the big book of William Bronk poems, Life Supports, and read one at random. It doesn’t matter which one shows up because they all release the same bracing smell and parch of stone, the same chill of stone in the shade. I don’t remember a single individual Bronk poem, and I don’t know if they’re actually memorable; anyhow, they don’t matter to me in that way. For me they’re like the small brown bottle my grandmother carried in her purse and sniffed for the pick-me-up jolt.
However little you thought you’d been trafficking in surfaces and ornament, after a Bronk poem you realize it was much too much; however cleansed of illusions you believed yourself to be, it looks like they built up anyhow. Bronk takes them off like paint stripper. You’re shriven, your head is shaved. The experience is religious in its ferocity and disdain for cheap solace.
Here, let me open to a poem—and I swear this one just turned up:
The Effect of Cause Despaired
Wanting the significance that cause and effect
might have (we see it in little things where it is)
not seeing it in any place
important to us (it is in our lives but in ways
that deny each other) and the totality,
I suppose, is what I mean—it isn’t there—
we look around: the possibilities,
dreams and diversions, whatever else there is.
If you aren’t familiar with Bronk, maybe this doesn’t thrill you. But if you are, it’s like dropping the needle down into the endless groove of an implacable, insatiable, relentless intelligence that allows itself not the least shred of consolation, not the thinnest veil of protection. Bronk’s poems are almost entirely abstract and disembodied, as the poem above, his language desiccated but also conversationally halting and embedded. There is no flesh, no world, precious little metaphor—as though every human attachment is cheating. If anything seems to work—such as cause and effect—it never adds up to anything. “We look around,” and, in the absence of any system that could explain our actions to ourselves, whatever “dream” or “diversion” we cook up is understood to be just that—a distraction from nothing.
Bronk is thinking and thinking, as purely as possible, about how we want—want not to be alone, want things to matter, want to feel that we are connected to reality. His poems are all about wanting and how there is no end to it. And about how whatever reality is, it is something we only know in the negative—by being constantly wrong about it.
Bronk’s body of work is a strange achievement which it is hard not to call brave. There is such a grave honor in its repetitiveness, how it harps on what it can’t have, and how it won’t bend—can’t bend. If I say that Bronk’s poems are like blocks of stone, similar, but each slightly different and fitted one to another, and if I say that one experiences a strange exhilaration and release in the presence of the stark monument they form, then I am echoing Bronk’s own description of the stonework of Machu Picchu in “An Algebra Among Cats,” my favorite essay in his remarkable book of essays, Vectors and Smoothable Curves.
Bronk is compelled by the “plain perfection” of Machu Picchu’s stones, whose “surfaces have been worked and smoothed to a degree just this side of that line where texture would be lost.” Standing among them, he feels released from the idea of time as moving from past to future and the accompanying illusion of human progress: “It is at least as though there were several separate scales of time; it is even as though for certain achievements of great importance, this city for example, there were a continuing present which made those things always contemporary.”
There are moments of aesthetic transport which weld beauty to beauty, occasional angles which offer a glimpse of something endless and compelling. Bronk feels it in the presence of the pure artifacts of Machu Picchu; I get a touch of it in the presence of Bronk.
IV
The Double
If I were only one person I could answer the question of how I perceive the
audience for poetry in a single way. But I am two people, so I must answer in two ways—first, as the godlike writer of poems, serenely independent of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and second, as her cousin.
1.
So to begin, let us draw close to the empyrean springs and ask the poet, even now dipping her alabaster hand into the poetical waters, how she feels about audience: “Do you think, as you write, about who will read your poems and how they will like them? Be honest.”
No, I do not. My attention is entirely taken up by the voice in my head—a perfect tyrant, utterly without charity. And a pig for pleasure, I might add. Ordinary conditions do not obtain. Take the condition of time, for example. While I’m trying to satisfy this inside voice, time takes on that bulgy condition it has during the most critical stage of a skid, where astonishing maneuvers become possible simply because they must (or you’ll crash). It is extremely occupying. When I was younger I noticed that I sweated terribly when I was writing, just as though it were very hard physical labor. I liked that evidence that I was grappling with something at least as difficult as uprooting an oak.
“You actually mean to say that you have no concern at all for any sort of reader?”
No, I cannot say that. There is a stain in the ichor—a sense of being watched and judged, and a desire for approval. When I am writing, I feel that I have insinuated myself at the long, long desk of the gods of literature—more like a trestle table, actually—so long that the gods (who are also eating, disputing, and whatnot, as well as writing) fade away in the distance according to the laws of Renaissance perspective. I am at the table of the gods and I want them to like me. There, I’ve said it. I want the great masters to enjoy what I write. The noble dead are my readers, and if what I write might jostle them a little, if there were a tiny bit of scooting and shifting along the benches, this would be my thrill. And I would add that the noble dead cannot be pleased with imitations of themselves; they are already quite full of themselves.