Relationships: The Rewards of Linkage

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I often doubt that value of social-networking gizmos such as Facebook. I sometimes even wonder why I bother to blog. But every once in awhile something comes my way via Facebook, or descends upon me out of the blogosphere, that makes it all worthwhile.

Example: today I read this excellent short story by Donald Hall, a link to which was posted by Pentimento on her outstanding blog. In conjunction with that, yesterday I started reading the 1987 memoir And a Voice to Sing With by Joan Baez. I had purchased the book years ago at a public library used book sale, but had never gotten around to reading it. It took a conversation about the ‘sixties, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez that I had with Pentimento via Facebook to prod me into finding the book. I haven’t been disappointed. As it happens, I was privileged to briefly meet both Donald Hall and Joan Baez in Ann Arbor, back in the day (circa 1968), so the conjunction of these cyber-social interactions and the readings they’ve inspired constitute the kind of synchronicity of which I’ve written before.

Below is a passage from Hall’s short story that I found to be a particularly insightful comment on the human condition. I urge you to follow the link above and read the whole story. The passage is the reminiscence of an aging woman, who as a child had to cope with her discovery of her mother’s infidelity and the resultant changes in the dynamics of her family:

Surely I was changed forever. Life at the farm was calm, but I lived elsewhere in my fancy. I absented myself by reading stories, imagining myself a reckless heroine or a pathetic victim. Outside the house of fiction I was chronically restless. Nothing in life, I knew, was what it appeared to be. When I read a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I recognized the minister and his pious congregation who met at midnight in the woods to celebrate mass for the devil. I knew that by universal conspiracy we agreed to deny the secret wickedness of every human being. We needed, every hour, to understand that the fabric of routine covered unseen deceptions and enormities. We also needed to remember that the cloth must show no rips or tears, and that this covering was as real as anything. I admired the fabrics my father and mother wove, whatever might throb or coil underneath the cloth. [italic emphasis added]

Oh, what tangled webs we weave…
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The graphic is a self-portrait of Joan Baez as a young girl, lifted from her memoir.

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Quote du Jour: Some Lucid Pound

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As one soul who fell into the world in the midst of the shitstorm known as the post-war baby boom, Donald Hall’s brilliant book, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, with its intimate portraits of Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound (among others) is particularly significant. With the exception of Dylan Thomas, who had already committed his public suicide when I was very young, these poets were all still alive in those years when I was first discovering my love of poetry. Collectively they formed what was at that time the Poetry Establishment. I only wish that Hall had also had experiences which would have allowed him to include e. e. cummings in the mix.

It is true that Pound was considered crazy and pretty much discounted by the time I have memories of him, but he loomed large in the pantheon, nonetheless. Pound may have been an ex-patriot fascist nutcase where it came to politics, but as an artist he was both brilliant and crucially important to the development of Modernism. Today's QdJ, from Hall’s interview with Pound, is an example of the perceptive intelligence underlying the madness:

Interviewer: Your work includes a great range of experience, as well as of form. What do you think is the greatest quality a poet can have? Is it formal, or is it a quality of thinking?

Ezra Pound: I don’t know that you can put the needed qualities in hierarchic order, but he must have a continuous curiosity, which of course does not make him a writer, but if he hasn’t got that he will wither. And the question of doing anything about it depends on a persistent energy. ...The transit from the reception of stimuli to the recording, to the correlation, that is what takes the whole energy of a lifetime.

(How could any poet look more American than does Pound in the portrait above? And don’t it make your brown eyes blue?)

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Reflections: Why His Old Eyes Shine

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I have written before about the poet, Donald Hall. I find myself currently reading a book of his that I picked up some time ago and have never gotten around to reading. This book, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, is a revision of an earlier book – Remembering Poets – extended by the addition of “More Poets.”

I may have mentioned in earlier posts that I consider Donald Hall to be a better writer of prose than he is a poet. In my humble, though perhaps biased, opinion, Hall’s wife (and my high school classmate), Jane Kenyon, was a better poet. Given the excerpt that follows, clipped from Hall’s introduction to Their Ancient Glittering Eyes (“Introduction: Old Poets”), I believe that he gives me permission to execute such a ranking. That which applies to the poem must likewise be applicable to the poet. Here is Hall:

It goes without saying – or it ought to – that we love some poems and call them great. When I wrote Remembering Poets I felt unabashed in my admiration for great poems. I still do. In the early 1920s Robert Grave’s examiners at Oxford reproved him for thinking that some poems were better than others. For decades, Graves’s anecdote ridiculed dons who found quality irrelevant, or the assertion of quality presumptuous. Now, in academic America, some dons again find it unscrupulous or naïve or oppressive to claim that one poem is better than another. The idea of superiority comes into question. Surely superiority is an awkward idea, even oppressive; but so is death. “There is no order,” said Samuel Johnson, “without subordination.”

A few pages further on in the same introduction, Hall introduces the topic of intimations of mortality, insofar as these harbingers of finality affect the emotional comfort of poets, and others. You may find it laughable that I have regarded myself primarily as a poet throughout my adult life. Since I’ve had neither the kind of ambition of which Hall speaks below, nor any capacity for self-promotion, my bardic self-image has gone virtually undetected by the world-at-large. But I’ve had no other profession. Ergo, whether I merit such bittersweet agony, or not, I feel that which Hall presents below to the very marrow:

... All poets die without knowing what their work is worth; many fear not only that they have messed up their lives for nothing, but that they have harmed the lives of others.
Maybe no one ambitious, in any line of work, dies with conviction of accomplishment. Throughout their lives, dissatisfaction with work done drives ambitious people to try again. While they keep life and energy, the disparity between goal and achievement can be countered by plans for further work, but when death is imminent, or when old age drains ability and strength, depression over failure may become inexorable. Remember Leonardo’s melancholy question at the end of his life: “Tell me if anything ever was done.”

Okay. So I’m an elitist, suffering under the self-delusion that I’m a poet. So shoot me.

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Addendum: Depending, I guess, on whether your orientation is one of introversion or extraversion, should you remove the dust jacket of my copy of Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, you would discover that either: the cover is attached upside down; or the pages are inverted top-to-bottom.

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Readings: Of Donald Hall, Poet

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I’m currently reading with pleasure Unpacking the Boxes, the memoire of Donald Hall, the 14th American Poet Laureate. I met Donald Hall when I was an undergraduate English major at the University of Michigan and he was on the faculty. In the past year I stumbled across the knowledge that Hall’s wife, Jane Kenyon, also a successful poet, was my classmate both at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and at the University. Yet I did not know her. This is, to me, a mystery. Tragically, Jane Kenyon died very young, in 1995. I will perhaps write more on this at a later time.

The excerpt below is taken from the first chapter of Unpacking the Boxes, which is entitled “Domains”:

In general the arts – theater and music and painting and sculpture and poetry – carry with them an aura of sexual freedom and license, some arts and artists more than others: jazz and rock musicians, dancers, actresses. Typically, readers have felt something erotic in poetry, something adventurous, wayward, sensuous, and forbidden. Late romanticism created the poète maudit: outlaw, madman, bohemian, overthrower of social convention – ...But even before artist decadents drank absinthe in dark cafés, poetry was sensual by its nature – in its internal structure, in its bodiliness, especially in its carnality of sound. Poetry is more erotic than fiction, which is why female poets were so rare until the mid-twentieth century. Jane Austen and George Eliot were permitted to write great novels, but the only great nineteenth-century woman poet was the eccentric eremite Emily Dickinson. In the first half of the twentieth-century, Marianne Moore was equally exceptional. The vast increase in the number of good women poets has coincided with sexual liberation.

There is much packed into that little paragraph which strikes a sympathetic chord in me.

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Update: Here is a link to Donald Hall's page on the Poets. org site

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