by Kay Ryan
2.
On the other hand, the lofty condition enjoyed by the poet takes up only perhaps two hours, or 1/84, of a week. A good week. I must spend 83/84 of the week as my cousin.
This cousin has a higher and, I’m sorry to say, a lower nature. Her higher nature sees itself as the steward of the poet’s work and responsible for helping that work secure a place in the world. This means that she must take an active, practical interest in living readers, not just by tidying poems themselves so that they’re fit to be seen, but also by moving the poet’s mover along the squares of the Poetry board the best she can. In this spirit, she seeks good journals for the poems and good presses for the books, accepts reading dates, and agrees to interviews, so that the poet might gain name recognition, by means of which the poet’s poems might reach an audience and rise or fall fairly, based upon their merit, instead of simply resting upon the bottom because nobody ever saw them.
On the other hand, the cousin’s lower nature simply enjoys la gloire, which comes by way of the audience. This spotlight hog trades eagerly upon the poems (which she didn’t write and only partially understands), larding readings (the bigger the better) with comic remarks and avoiding the poems that aren’t snappy. She needs to know the audience is out there, and the quickest way to feel it is through their laughter. Her only ambition is to hold the audience. I often see her as a betrayer of the poet, but she isn’t. Secretly they are best friends.
Reading before Breakfast
The books I regularly pick up in the morning, for the few minutes or half hour before I set about my own writing, are not casual interests. These are books I can only open in the morning because only then can I bear them. I go to these writers because they contain the original ichor. They are the potent Drink Me. On weak days, even a look at the blue, vertically striped spine of Joseph Brodsky’s Less Than One or On Grief and Reason repels me.
My mother liked to tell how my brother as a little boy would sneak up on his Golden Book Hansel and Gretel, open it to the picture of the witch, and cry with fear. He came back again and again. My books are like that; I have reread them so often that they open to the witch.
I have two dozen morning books. Usually I can’t remember when I read them for the first time. But sometimes I can; Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature is the experience that endures from a long-ago camping trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park. It is dislocating to read a book of such aesthetic intensity out of doors; I’m not sure it’s a good idea. The landscape twists tight as a tornado and vanishes, sucked down through the storm door of the book. There might be such a thing as too much torque. Instruments would record some very strange warping in that campground for those two or three days. Last summer a lovely bay on the Marin County coast was similarly sucked up, this time by Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed.
In any case, reading is merely the first step to rereading. It has just occurred to me that rereading imitates our most picturesque images of creation and transformation. We have heard it reported, for example, that a whole concerto would come to Mozart in a single flash. A composition based on melody that must move through time—pages and pages of notation—arrives stacked on top of itself, or perhaps radiates out from some middle. Or, to offer a chemical analogy, imagine a glass filled with a supersaturated solution; if you give it a tap, it could turn to crystals. Rereading is like these mysteries. Open to a paragraph or even a line and—tap!—the complete composition precipitates. I never “acquire” these books. It is maddening, but I can never remember books, especially my favorite ones. I don’t like them to come up in conversation. But if I reread a line, then it is all around me again, my real landscape, my real feelings, all familiar. Where have I been?
I often feel, along with the world at large, that we have quite enough poems. Writing a poem does not fit with much else in one’s life. Except for the writing of poems, one might think of one’s life as a busy restaurant that is pretty happy with itself. In order to write a poem I have to pass through that busy restaurant. This is where my books are critical. Those books are my goons. My goons go in first, pull out their guns, and clear the place. After that, I have my pick of tables; or I can just keep going.
First my books dispatch ordinary ideas of “community”: “The essential thing that takes place between things does not take place through their intercourse, but through the seemingly isolated, seemingly unconcerned, seemingly unconnected action that each of them performs,” says Martin Buber in his introduction to The Legend of the Baal-Shem. Blam! This kind of thinking gives a writer some elbow room.
Here one is free not to be oneself: “A book is the product of a self other than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices”; or “the writer’s true self is manifested in his books alone.” These are observations by Proust which Kundera quotes. Such quotes by my favorites offer a double joy. First, as in this instance, there is the attractiveness of what is quoted; and second, there is the pleasurable sensation of endless doors opening, author through author, all the way back to the first word. It is much bigger in here than in the restaurant.
One is freed of the oppression of “progress.” Says William Bronk, admiring the unsurpassable beauty of Machu Picchu, “we have not advanced … as we have tried with the encumbrance of our far more numerous and varied skills to achieve a degree of perfection which was reached so simply here so long ago.” I find it lovely to hear our skills acknowledged as “encumbrances.” This comes from poet Bronk’s book of essays, Vectors and Smoothable Curves. I notice that most of my morning books are by poets and novelists—but their essays rather than their poetry or novels. Naturally, since I choose them, my authors comment on each other and support certain attitudes—despising confession; quick to dispatch suffering (“Kafka did not suffer for us! He enjoyed himself for us!”—Kundera); bewitched by the “shimmer of the gratuitous” (Updike’s introduction to Nabakov’s Lectures on Literature). Here is Kundera augmenting Bronk on the subject of progress: “History is not necessarily a path climbing upward (toward the richer, more cultivated) … the demands of art may be counter to the demands of the moment (of this or that modernity), and … the new (the unique, the inimitable, the previously unsaid) might lie in some direction other than the one everybody sees as progress.”
I cannot imagine that these snippets I am offering here are mixing the morning martinis in you that they are in me. Indeed, I hope they are not. I’m with Auden in The Dyer’s Hand: “Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it.” How can I say it? Such books are the private, the select company of a mind to which I often lack access myself.
To Be Miniature Is to Be Swallowed by a Miniature Whale
This is wisdom I gleaned from experience. And when I say gleaned I mean picked up off the ground after the commercial harvesters had come through. This is wisdom nobody much wanted; I surely didn’t. Of course, much wisdom is things we never wanted to know. (Itself an additional piece of wisdom, again demonstrating how discouraging wisdom is.)
But to return to the question of the miniature, we find imbedded in this prescient line the design flaw inherent in the impulse to miniaturize: all in the world you wind up doing is changing the scale of everything. If you manage to make yourself small (I was thinking about trying to have a very small life to escape the interest of, say, fate), you only excite a small whale to swallow you.
The stories of the miniature go down and down and down; small becomes the new large, over and over. In The Third Policeman, the great Flann O’Brien gets the last chest the policeman makes so infinitesimally small that it took him “three years to make and it took … another year to believe [he] had.” As with all processes, there is no end. The contemplation of the miniature is therefore destabilizing, dizzying, sickening. There isn’t any size that’s the “real size” after a while. (O’Brien could have gone on.)
I remember when Carol
and I were riding our mountain bikes along the White Rim Trail in Utah for four days. To get down to the edge of the Colorado River where the trail was, we had to descend hundreds of feet of steep cliff. But then the trail was again at the edge of a steep cliff, below which toiled the muscular Colorado. After a bit of time we came to think of our level as ground level, and of the carved cliffs above us as mountains. Only at the end of the trip when we were again up top did we remember the “real” mountains that you see from up there.
Thinking, in general, so quickly becomes canyons inside canyons.
Of course, it is tempting to go where the great Walter Benjamin went, that is, adoring two grains of wheat with the whole Shema Israel inscribed on them because of their smallness, their compactness, how they embodied the most in the least space, and since the tiniest thing contains everything (Benjamin believed), the grains of wheat were the most excellent available token of that truth—though of course immense, crude, and partial by O’Brien’s policeman’s standards.
We do feel magic in certain small things. Perhaps because we imagine that operations in an unimaginably tiny dimension would work … better? … differently? In any case, by changing size, so that we can’t get in there anymore, generating rooms too small to actually occupy, we give ourselves the possibility of everything turning out otherwise than it does here. We loosen an imaginative space that gets larger as it gets smaller.
All we’re ever doing is messing with brain operations. Isolating such things is a fundamental ambition of the artist William Kentridge. He is fascinated with how art fools the eye and tries to isolate that place where the mind is both making a pattern and being patterned. He calls it a “membrane,” in Six Drawing Lessons, the book of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. It can be drawing paper. It’s any scrim that reveals the extreme vitality and flightiness of, what shall we call it, knowing?
A little poem is as fine a demonstration of this membrane as Kentridge’s drawings of a black cat or rhinoceros or his scraps of black paper that can be scooted into an irresistible horse. We know the horse is scraps of paper and we also know—cannot resist knowing—that it is a horse. Not an “outside” horse, not a horse up on top of Utah on top of the White Rim Trail, but a magic horse. As the products of miniaturization are magic.
The poem occupies the same place; it is made partly by the poet (scooting words toward each other, words which may themselves be self-attractive) and partly by the reader when the mind cannot resist the horse. Employing the tastes of Walter Benjamin, I will argue that the poem that is closest to the size of two grains of wheat will hold the most magic.
And this is the magic I’m interested in: not the astonishment kind, not the how-did-he-do-that kind, but the release kind. You are not made to feel large and clumsy by comparison to the exquisite tiny thing; you are invited to eat the magic bean. You laugh. You feel … right-sized.
So the miniature: it can go two ways. It can make you kind of sick with its destabilization (the chest within the chest within the chest, dimension called attention to and forever unfixed, little becomes big becomes little). Or it can make you feel kind of well with its destabilization: you find yourself comfortably inside of and just the right size for someplace you can’t be.
Against Influence
I’ve always bristled when it’s been suggested that my work has been “influenced” by this or that poet. Sometimes the suggestion is laughably wrong—a poet I have never read let alone attempted to ventriloquize—and other times it’s really true but no more useful than saying I’d been influenced by being a mammal. That is: true, but not distinguishing. Still, the question of influence remains an interesting one.
When I first became aware of the exhilarations of poetry as a community college freshman on the Mojave Desert, the poets who moved me were immaculately remote from my world. That was one of their attractions: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jesuit priest, so incantatory I could barely understand him; John Donne, priest again, even earlier in the British lineage, and glorious crafter of something called conceits.
Lots of British priests in the poetry business, it looked like. Plus Emily Dickinson. I loved the strenuousness of it all, the rigors, the long lonely vigil of it, the doomed quality. Here, I thought, is fit meat for the mind. And the fact was that my mind was very hungry.
Hungry minds—the selfish, burrowing, opportunistic minds of the young who will rip the flesh off anything that might feed them—these are the salvation of writers. I often think about this, how the readers who keep writing alive are comically self-serving; they are trying to find access to their own brains, some way in, some key to make their own heads work. They rummage and plunder with catholic zeal, accidentally performing a service to culture that no number of academics or disinterested readers could accomplish. They have demonstrated one more time how great literature keeps on freeing minds to do other things.
For me, pretty early, Frost worked. Not all of him—I have never had the temperament for long narratives—but it doesn’t take much. Let us consider the briefest of his lyrics.
Look at the nerve of this:
Dust of Snow
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Frost has written this so limpidly that it would be possible to look right through it. That is, it would be possible to think that it was nothing special, instantly understandable and as quickly dismissed.
Stanza 1: A crow in a tree knocks snow down on the speaker.
Stanza 2: This tiny event shifts things inside the speaker.
Plus the poem rhymes: conventional rhymes in predictable places. Well, except maybe mood / rued.
This is just about the most exciting thing a poet can do: tread the edge of the banal. How close to nothing can he get and stay on the big side of nothing? Because the big side is really big. Borderless.
If we were to think of this little Frost poem as “conventional, predictable, dismissible,” it would be something like Frost’s own “day I had rued.” That is, we would feel bored with it in advance of reading it, as Frost “rues” his day before he’s finished it.
Except! Something dumps something on our head and we get that little Zen slap and it’s all funny and broken up. We suddenly see that the conventions of the little poem, the predictability of crow/snow, heart/part, the whole little thing, is the thinnest shell around a mystery that we all know and that nevertheless remains a mystery: everything can shift at any instant. The poem does what the crow did. It cracks heads.
Frost is sneaky. While seeming to be quietly faithful to some quaint New England scene, he is actually stripping away every bit of extraneous color: the poem winds up as simple as a Japanese ink study. There is great energy available if you can stimulate the reader’s conventional expectations and then hijack them. That’s where the life always is, right as you walk under the tree expecting more New England and getting Japan instead.
The explosion of freedom inside the poem is pure neutral freedom, not named Frost or named anything; it’s denatured and become perfectly useful by an opposite temperament.
And this is what takes the onus off the idea of “influence.” The thing that really sticks from a great poet like Frost isn’t the snow and harness bells or the rest of it; it’s the immense enduring enterprise of reclaiming freedom for himself poem by poem, how—like Hopkins or Donne or Dickinson—Frost was saving himself, and that saving always has a necessary dispatch—speed, impatience, relentlessness, stubbornness—that hooks it to all the other savings, until it’s not influence at all but a shared ionized something.
On Forgetting
It is easy to be sentimental about memory because of its powers to intensify. If something is remembered, it has been selected by the mind, out of an almost infinite pool of things that might have been remembe
red but weren’t. The thing remembered thus becomes important, simply because it has been remembered. How interesting is that? Who’s to say that the unremembered silver fruit knife situated just behind the remembered peach wouldn’t have made the better thing to have retained? This of course feels like a very unnatural argument; memories are important to us because we cannot control them—exactly because we cannot choose to remember the fruit knife rather than the peach. Memories seem to us like messages from the past whose author isn’t quite the self we know. They have a position similar to dreams in the sense that they are visited upon us. They enjoy the respect and special lighting accorded the mysterious.
I suppose I have no quarrel with this, although I do think that people can get very stuck in detail if their memories are too accurate or, alternatively, they can live in an adolescent misty supercharged half-realm if their memories are not accurate but nonetheless intense, memories which have so ambered with repeated rememberings that they have become simplified, enlarged, and stylized (usually in the directions of Good and Evil).
But why am I talking about memory when I want to talk about forgetting. I have always had a memory especially defined by forgetting. It is hard to say, in my case, which is the cheese and which is the holes: I believe that emptiness (forgetting) may be the cheese, in which there are occasional suspended chambers of remembering.
If one has always been like this, it’s not at all bad. In my case, I have been able to stand an incredible amount of routine because I’m not entirely aware that I have done it before. People with my sort of memory are good in positions requiring constant freshness in the face of what others might find unbearable repetition, the security guard’s rounds, perhaps, or the toll taker’s transactions. I should say here that lacking memory does not make one stupid; it could be argued that it makes one free. Of course this freedom can be frightening; one can be too untethered.