The Hide-and-Seek Muse Read online

  In a seminal essay written over thirty years ago, “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?,” Marjorie Perloff explores oppositional aesthetic streams and “mutual distrust” in American poetry in the late twentieth century. The early new millennium poems in The Hide-and-Seek Muse suggest to me not so much the question of “whose century is it?” but “whose century isn’t it?” With the proliferation of MFA programs in the past three or four decades; the popularity and accessibility of the spoken word surge and a cosmos of cyber-venues; anxiety about who is and is not anthologized into the canon; dramatic changes—philosophical, technological, cultural—in how literature is published, disseminated, and promoted; and the “them what gets, gets” po-biz prize culture, not to mention the fact that there are probably more poets in any one apartment building in Brooklyn than in my entire town, it is important always to refresh and refresh again our awareness of what is being written, and why, and of what in our legacy is therefore being honored, forgotten, transformed, even as new thresholds, new anatomies are being shut down, but also created, made possible. Extension and rupture. Rupture and extension. “Touch the universe anywhere,” wrote poet A. R. Ammons, and “you touch it everywhere.” Now more than ever this rings true—with regard to American poetry, and in relation to the praxis and theory of writing in general.

  As with all anthologies, the great regret is what must, because of constraints of space or for reasons of theme and focus, be omitted from this particular conversation. Every one of the Chronicle poems, commentaries, and columns written since the inception of the series is archived at the Chronicle Review, and I refer readers interested in exploring the whole menu of included writers to that website, and to the now defunct Arts & Academe and Brainstorm blogs in particular.

  I must thank first my discerning, gifted, good-natured Chronicle editor, Alex Kafka, for inviting me to undertake this weekly endeavor in the first place. Writing “Monday’s Poem” has been an education for me, and working with him each week an enlightening pleasure. That the Chronicle of Higher Education allowed Alex and me to bring our passion for poetry into the realm and discourse of the academy in this way for nearly two years is also cause for gratitude.

  I am deeply indebted to the intrepid Ravi Shankar for believing that these pieces warranted a more permanent home between the covers of a book, and then offering to publish that book under the imprimatur and auspices of his bold and beautiful Drunken Boat Media enterprise. Ardent thanks to Nick Flynn for offering his fresh, inimitable lens on the project.

  Every writer involved in the “Monday’s Poem” project has impressed me again and again with his or her unique poetic gifts and great generosity in sharing work with me and with our readers. I think I speak for the poets as well as for myself in thanking the readers of the Chronicle offerings, as well. I proffer a special shout-out to the indefatigable and gracious Don Selby and Diane Boller at Poetry Daily, who kindly linked the Chronicle pieces at their news page every Monday.

  Several colleagues—chiefly Stephen Cushman, Jerry McGann, Debra Nystrom, and Jahan Ramazani—have been especially supportive and helpful since the inception of the Chronicle series. My poetry students, by their own poetic examples and in our discussions in seminars and workshops, have helped to shape each and every one of these pieces. Special thanks to June Webb for her assistance at every step of the way. Generous support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and from a Carole Weinstein Poetry award afforded deeply welcomed sustenance, emotional and otherwise, during the making of this book. Finally, I am grateful to the University of Virginia and in particular to the Office of the Vice President for Research and the College of Arts and Sciences, whose assistance in the form of an Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences research award helped invaluably in the completion of this project.

  This book is dedicated with love to Jocelyn, Adam, and Suzannah—my Muses, and poets three.

  WHITMAN & DICKINSON

  IN OUR SPACE

  WHITMAN & DICKINSON IN OUR SPACE

  We live in a time of rampant, mercurial self-portrayal. We can, if we wish, post, profile, tag, chat, friend, transform, lie, project, stalk, date, connect, complicate, simplify, vex, blog, tumble, pin, like, and identify ourselves with dazzling velocity through a protean real-time landscape of social networks, ranging from the ubiquitous Facebook to virtual communities enmeshed by an interest in couch-surfing, opera, anime, and an array of signifying passions whose devotees, virtual and real, are forming and communing and falling apart even as I type.

  Poetry—American lyric poetry, in particular—has always engaged in a paradoxical relationship with selfhood, identity, and influence. “I celebrate myself,” Walt Whitman pronounced in 1855, revealing later in the same poem a mad, collective desire to be “quiver[ed] to a new identity.” Whitman’s sister poetic American innovator, Emily Dickinson, wrote “I’m nobody! Who are you?” but could not have been more concerned with the spiritual, emotional, and erotic circumference of the discreet self, what she would call that “Campaign inscrutable / Of the Interior”:

  I felt my life with both my hands

  To see if it was there—

  I held my spirit to the Glass,

  To prove it possibler—

  I turned my Being round and round

  And paused at every pound

  To ask the Owner’s name—

  For doubt, that I should know the sound—.

  Their poetic personae were various and contradictory. Whitman could be, by turns, a sensuous speaker of the nation, a vital man, “one of the roughs,” or a depraved, broken, street-bound beggar. Dickinson could be coy and childlike, or ferociously masterful (“Title divine, is mine / The Wife without the Sign”), leading Camille Paglia to call her the Madame de Sade of Amherst.

  Whitman and Dickinson both composed and copied much of their work on scraps of paper and in small notebooks or hand-stitched booklets. Dickinson wrote at a table the size of a child’s desk. How did the exigencies of nineteenth-century life and the technologies of writing culture inform the poems they made—Whitman, the printer, with his choice of an oversized folio for his quicksilver tonal shifts, his relentless lists and cataloging? Or Dickinson’s wildly compressed, volatile, arguably Twitterable and hypertextual scribal explosions that often flooded and confounded the page at hand?

  How will our rapid-fire technologies—our implacable, virtual networks, tiny screens and keyboards, our busy thumbs—affect the poems we make as we move through the second decade of the twenty-first century? In what ways, if at all, will the writing spaces we inherit and inhabit, and the ways in which we mark them, reflect and create our sense of or unconcern with selfhood in the American lyric poem and how that consciousness is communicated? How will our innovations speak to our influences, literary and extra-literary?

  I have students who speak their ideas for poems into their cell phones, which puts me mind of Wordsworth, composing as he walked. Others take up Gertrude Stein and others’ avant-garde thread, playing with Flarf, Spoetry, Spamlit, Word salad, and other continually morphing, generative modes that challenge canonical approaches and plunder technologies with intelligence, energy, and subversion—a fresh takes on Hart Crane’s “new thresholds, new anatomies.”

  That poetry continues to explore human consciousness in its slippery, manifest, and veiled complexity binds me to its emerging voices and embodiments. What is the American self inherited and forged in the increasingly multi-cultural and cross-genre American poem? What is the American poem in such a context? I love the ways in which the hybrid autobiographical verses of Kazim Ali’s Bright Felon or Jennifer Chang’s post-pastoral History of Anonymity, for example, talk back to both Dickinson and Whitman while exploring cinema, physics, legend, and politics with current attention and savvy. Charles Wright once quipped, “If your backyard is just your backyard, you might as well crack open another Budweiser.” In American poems, the turf of the private self will always represent more than itself, formally, linguistically, culturally
. That the opposite is also true is also cause to read and make poems.

  THE HIDE-AND-SEEK MUSE

  THE HIDE-AND-SEEK MUSE

  My father, a smart man, believes that poetry is out to trick him, a fact apparent in the deer-in-the-headlights discomfort he exhibits whenever I present him with one of my books or a poem by one of the grandchildren. Coleridge’s assertion that poetry is “the best words in their best order” would be a laughable notion to him, a man who prefers to get the news from The Washington Post and the Journal of the American Chemical Society. And it’s not just lay readers who find poetry difficult. Some of my brightest English majors feel this way. The chair of a local high school English Department shared with me that her colleagues are so afraid of poetry that they find ways to avoid teaching it altogether. When faced with the task of coming up with a “definition” of poetry for a state curricular rubric, her group was unable to begin to frame a response, let alone reach a consensus. They finally came up with something like “unusual language that sometimes rhymes and sometimes doesn’t.”

  I’m quite sure I can’t come up with a single definition of poetry either. But I suspect that the most resistant or wary readers of verse, even if they can’t say what poetry is, have written or received a poem—in a love letter, a diary, a condolence card, a Valentine, a school assignment—a bit of language written under especial duress or frustration or longing or sadness, language forged under pressure, perhaps at a Dickinsonian “White Heat,” words that came out not as prose but as something else, something more … intense, musical, playful, figurative, compressed. Something urgently expressed, with something at stake in the telling.

  The New Jersey poet and physician William Carlos Williams is well known for saying that “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Back when I was directing the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of Virginia, I used to get at least one telephone call every two or three weeks from citizens seeking a poem recommendation, something appropriate for a funeral, a wedding, an anniversary, a birthday. The calls were especially heavy, as one might imagine, on September 11, 2001, and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For emotional, psychic, intellectual sustenance—for inspiration, solace, and a reminder of what it means to be fully human—nothing quite affects us like poetry.

  Yet like my high school English teacher friend and her faculty, readers of poetry come to the art with a wide, diverse spectrum of expectations, tastes, predilections, desires. This subjectivity was brought home to me afresh recently in a graduate poetry seminar. We were reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, a text by an author famous for her hermetic poetic experiments, syntactical innovations, and associative linguistic theatrics. A few students had the predictable reaction of wanting, at least initially, to throw the book across the room. Another young woman, who was suffering from a head cold, admitted that she’d begun to appreciate Stein only after she’d consumed some sinus medication and began to rap the poems aloud; this confession inspired an impromptu performance of “Mutton,” with a particularly adept classmate providing the bass backbeat soundtrack. Other students in the class, however, a surprising number, found themselves “moved” by the beauty of poems—as language, as music, as testaments of intimacy, eroticism, and love, as in these lines from “A Long Dress”:

  What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a

  long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.

  What is the wind, what is it.

  Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it.

  Readers, then, with our various “negative capabilities,” our distinct temperamental inclinations and varying tolerances for order, for chaos, are drawn, if we’re attracted to poetry at all, to different poets and poetic styles. Some of us prefer poems in plain speech, what Heather McHugh has called, in her introduction to Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, a “very windexed window,” in which “language intends to dissolve in the service of its meaning.” Other readers like to get caught in the net of language, Paul Celan’s hindurchgehen, that going back again through the word-mesh, where the world is not only reflected but created. “That,” McHugh writes, “is why poetry is not exposition. It is the place that suffers inscription. It bears the mark or scar of what was seen and what was grasped …. It takes upon itself, into itself, what it sees; the song is of insight …. it requires you to face the difficulty, the unfathomability, of your life.”

  In her essay “Invitation and Exclusion,” which explores why some poets inspire us as readers and writers while others seem to leave us outside, to shut us down, Louise Glück writes, “The poems from which I feel excluded are not poems from which I can learn. Neither are they poems I can ignore.” Some among us will never make reading poetry a practice or habit, despite that closet poem I suspect even my father has squirreled away somewhere. What Glück, McHugh, Stein, and others remind me to do, though, is to make a more active practice of reading (and even writing) poems outside my comfort zone. My own propensity is for the compressed, brocaded, gnomic, and interior lyric. All the more reason, then, for me to delve again into the beauties and gifts of more transparent poems or longer, more narrative pieces, and to challenge and inspire myself, as reader and writer, with aesthetics and sensibilities alien to my own. As Dickinson puts it in a poem from 1861, “A transport one cannot contain / May yet, a transport be—.”

  EDWARD HIRSCH

  To Poetry

  Don’t desert me

  just because I stayed up last night

  watching The Lost Weekend.

  I know I’ve spent too much time

  praising your naked body to strangers

  and gossiping about lovers you betrayed.

  I’ve stalked you in foreign cities

  and followed your far-flung movements,

  pretending I could describe you.

  Forgive me for getting jacked on coffee

  and obsessing over your features

  year after jittery year.

  I’m sorry for handing you a line

  and typing you on a screen,

  but don’t let me suffer in silence.

  Does anyone still invoke the Muse,

  string a wooden lyre for Apollo,

  or try to saddle up Pegasus?

  Winged horse, heavenly god or goddess,

  indifferent entity, secret code, stored magic,

  pleasance and half wonder, hell,

  I have loved you my entire life

  without even knowing what you are

  or how—please help me—to find you.

  Not a Sunday goes by since its passing out of tabloid insert print format in February 2009 that I do not mourn and miss The Washington Post Book World, a fixture of my weekends since I first moved to Virginia in the 1970s. For the better part of a decade in the 1980s, when I lived in Texas, I continued to subscribe to and receive the Book World by snail mail. And for a three-year spell, from 2002 – 2005, I looked forward especially to Edward Hirsch’s column, “Poet’s Choice,” a weekly meditation in the Book World on some aspect of poetry to which Hirsch would bring his widely read, articulate, capacious, encyclopedic, and ardent discernment. What Hirsch has elsewhere written of Keats—that he “combined … associative drift with a startling openheartedness and a ferocious working intellect, the mind of a maker”—might be said of Hirsch as poet and essayist as well.

  By the time Hirsch began presenting his Poet’s Choice column in the years immediately following the September 11th tragedy, I already knew and admired his poems, which I’d been reading since the early eighties. These Poet’s Choice columns—like his poems—always seemed to arrive “on time” for me, rekindling my interest in poetry if the exigenci
es of my life had dulled its luster for me, introducing me to new poems and poets that provided solace in time’s dark patches, confirming and enlarging my own responses to and assumptions about language while challenging me to think in new ways.

  Hirsch evinces, in poems and essays, an intimate—and rare—empathy for and with his subjects, which range from high and low culture, from insomnia to Jimi Hendrix, from the resonant mythologies and nostalgias of childhood to the work of under-read poets, many of whom—Charlotte Mew, Pedro Pérez Conde, Jane Mayhall, Alfonsin Storni, Blaga Dimitrova, Lam Rhi My Da, Michael Fried, among others—I encountered for the first time through the generous portal of Hirsch’s vision. And at a time when close reading of and forthright enthusiasm for poetry was (and is) often out of fashion, especially in the academy, I have been abidingly grateful for Hirsch’s endeavor. The range and depth of such passionate knowledge might be formidable, but he never makes his intelligence an occasion for proselytizing, obfuscation, or showing off, rather inviting, with a Keatsian “inhabitable awe,” his readers to share in the protean emotions and complications of being a maker and of engaging with what is possible and mysterious, even joyful, in poetry. I miss his weekly offerings, but turn and return to the printed collection of them, Poet’s Choice, published by HarcourtBooks in 2006.