Hirsch, Edward;
How to read a poem: and fall in love with poetry
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Harvest Book), 2000, 354 pages
ISBN 0156005662, 9780156005661
topics: | poetry | critic
hirsch has put together an amazing smorgasbord of poets, critics, snippets of biographies and ways of looking at poetry. amazingly erudite, yet amazingly heartfelt. you step on his ship with him and are carried along on the waves of poetry. he gives you poems, page after page. after each comes a breathless narrative mingling the poet, and what he said and how it was astonishing and proust and beckett and donne and but sometimes things don't work that well. some of the poems don't work as well for you as it seems to do for him. it is then that his endless flow of praise - a "great poet", a "splendid poet", poets Hirsch "adores",
The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said: A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. [Celan was picking up something that the] The great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, destroyed in a Stalinist camp, had identified in On the Addressee. But of course those friends aren't necessarily the people around him in daily life. They may be the friends he only hopes exist, or will exist, the ones his words are seeking. Mandelstam wrote: At a critical moment, a seafarer tosses a sealed bottle into the ocean waves, containing his name and a message detailing his fate. Wandering along the dunes many years later, I happen upon it in the sand. I read the message, note the date, the last will and testament of one who has passed on. I have the right to do so. I have not opened someone else's mail. The message in the bottle was addressed to its finder. I found it. That means, I have become its secret addressee. Whitman's poem "To You," - it consists in its entirety of two rhetorical questions: Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you? [p.3] I adore Guillaume Apollinaire's Calligrammes, a term he coined for the kind of shaped poem he believed he had invented, but in fact he was developing the latest avant-garde manifestation of what in Latin poetry was called carmen figuratum (figured poems).
It's raining women's voices as if they had died even in memory
And it's raining you as well marvellous encounters of my life O little drops
Those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities
Listen if it's raining while regret and disdain weep an ancient music
Listen to the bonds fall off which hold you above and below
We are the poor, bewildered quills,
The little scissors and the grieving penknife.
- Guido Cavalcanti ("splendid Florentine poet") p.28
In Obra poetica, Octavio Paz says:
The taste of the apple (states Berkeley) lies in the contact of the
fruit with the palate. Not in the fruit itself; in a similar way …
poetry lies in the meeting of the poem and reader, not in the lines
of the symbols printed on the pages of a book. (p.29)
[much of the following is available online at http://www.mrbauld.com/hirschrd.html]
I have carried the message in a bottle home, but now I must decipher it. ... Poiesis [poi\-esis] means making and, as the ancient Greeks recognized, the poet is first and foremost a maker. [OED: ancient Greek ποητής, early variant of ποιητής maker, author, poet < ποεῖν, ποιεῖν to make, create, produce, to compose, write ( < the same Indo-European base as Sanskrit cinoti he collects, assembles) Gives three poems "that have lodged in me as a reader"...
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
(from her last book of poems, Geography III)
"One Art" is a kind of instruction manual on loss. It's infused with that wry
tonal irony so characteristic of Bishop's late poetry. The blank verse is
pitched at the level of speech ("Lose something every day") and the language
is natural sounding and deceptively informal, given the formal requirements
of the lyric. The poem is a villanelle--that defiant French contraption with
its roots in Italian folk song, which came into American poetry late in the
nineteenth century. Like all villanelles, it has nineteen lines divided into
six stanzas--five tercets and one quatrain--turning on two rhymes and built
around two refrains. The first and third lines rhyme throughout, as do the
middle lines of each stanza. (The word "stanza" means room in Italian and the
center rhymes help connect the rooms of this lyric dwelling.) The first and
third lines become the refrain of alternate stanzas and the final two lines
of the poem. As itturns and returns, Bishop's verse becomes a model of
stability and change, repetition and variation. The first line--"The art of
losing isn't hard to master"--repeats exactly throughout the poem, whereas
the second refrain never repeats in its initial form and modulates entirely
around the word "disaster." So, too, the poem combines feminine or
multisyllabic rhymes (such as "master" and "disaster") with masculine or
one-syllable rhymes (such as ''spent" and "meant"), deftly varying its full
or exact rhymes with Dickinsonian half-rhymes (such as "fluster" and
"master"). It also characteristically runs an enjambed line into an
end-stopped one (as in the fourth stanza: "And look! my last, or /
next-to-last, of three loved houses went"), thus creating a sense of
qualification, of hesitating forward movement and momentary rest. The
momentum is chastened or balanced by circularity, the circularity ruptured by
a progressive movement forward. This model of formal ingenuity deserves to
stand with such other exemplary modern villanelles as W. H. Auden's "If I
Could," Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," Theodore
Roethke's "The Waking," and Weldon Kees's "The Crack Moving down the Wall."
What especially intrigues me about "One Art," however, is how Bishop has
built a second structure into the villanelle. She has reconstructed or
reconfigured it so that the form itself becomes causal to the meaning. She
starts small and continually enlarges the losses, beginning with
inconsequential things--the door keys, the wasted hour--and moving up from
there. The third stanza, I think, provides the essential clue as to how we
are meant to read and consequently to interpret this poem. "Then practice
losing farther, losing faster," she writes, signifying that the losses are
going to progress, going farther, coming more quickly. It is worse to give up
"places, and names, and where it was you meant / to travel" than to misplace
keys or misspend an hour, though, as she hastens to add, it's still not a
catastrophe. She then enlarges the terms by moving to the first poignant loss
in the poem, the first thing that truly matters. "I lost my mother's watch."
Now we are getting closer to home. "And look!" she exclaims, focusing the
reader into an intimate listener, a confidante: "my last, or / next-to-last,
of three loved houses went." It's characteristic of Bishop to diffuse the
more melodramatic statement--"my last of three loved houses went"--by
qualifying it for accuracy. The ethic of this poet is never to overstate the
nature of the feeling, to be as precise as possible about the impact of
loss. In the next stanza she enlarges that loss yet again, moving from the
penultimate house to two beautiful cities and, even larger than that, some
Shakespearian "realms," including a couple of splendid rivers and an entire
continent where she once lived. We have completed an arc that moves from
losing door keys to relinquishing a continent. And now for the first time in
the poem, in the fifteenth line and the penultimate stanza, she acknowledges
losing something she actually misses. "I miss them," she admits, immediately
adding, "but it wasn't a disaster."
"Surely there is an element of mortal panic and fear underlying all works of
art?" Elizabeth Bishop asked--rhetorically--in her essay on Marianne
Moore. "One Art" is a poem that summons such feelings even as it resists,
contains, and tries not to succumb to them. That makes it all the more moving
when the resistance finally caves in at the end. Here is another poem of
mortal panic and fear, Pablo Neruda's "Solo la muerte" ("Nothing but Death")
a lyric of radical overstatement from Residencia en la tierra (Residence on
Earth) that desperately flings itself at human loss. Instead of trying to
fend off the feeling, as Bishop does, Neruda invokes and summons it at every
point.
tr. Robert Bly There are cemeteries that are lonely, graves full of bones that do not make a sound, the heart moving through a tunnel, in it darkness, darkness, darkness, like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves, as though we were drowning inside our hearts, as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul. And there are corpses, feet made of cold and sticky clay, death is inside the bones, like a barking where there are no dogs, coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere, growing in the damp air like tears or rain. Sometimes I see alone coffins under sail, embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair, with bakers who are as white as angels, and pensive young girls married to notary publics, caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead, the river of dark purple, moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death, filled by the sound of death which is silence. Death arrives among all that sound like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it, comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no finger in it, comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no throat. Nevertheless its steps can be heard and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree. I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see, but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets, of violets that are at home in the earth, because the face of death is green, and the look death gives is green, with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf and the somber color of embittered winter. But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom, lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies, death is inside the broom, the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses, it is the needle of death looking for thread. Death is inside the folding cots: it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses, in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out: it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets, and the beds go sailing toward a port where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral. Neruda's poem is filled with such black sounds. It is a magnet for them. This lucid dream has a wild surreal associativeness, but it also has a relentless logic of its own. The spiritual problem is death--only death, a death that is everywhere. The technical problem--an index to the spiritual one--is how to write about it; that is, how to dramatize a ubiquitous presence, an omnivorous Something, which manifests itself as an absence, as Nothingness. The poet of Whitmanesque ambitions must find a way to present something that has as its sole purpose--its fundamental obligation, its exclusive business--taking things away. Consequently, in "Nothing but Death" Neruda was forced--or forced himself--to invent an imaginative structure and develop an imagistic strategy for dramatizing and incarnating what he sees as the quintessence of death itself. "There are cemeteries that are lonely, / graves full of bones that do not make a sound," Neruda asserts, thus beginning almost gothically by establishing the backdrop of the poem, but also projecting a human feeling--loneliness--into the graveyards. The cemeteries are lonely because they make us feel lonely, because the poet is overwhelmed by loneliness when he thinks of human beings reduced to silent piles of bones. The journey toward death, dying itself, is a necessarily inward experience--"like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves"--but once death takes over the subjects--and we are all subjects--turn into objects. There is an enormous abyss between subject and object. "And there are corpses, / feet made of cold and sticky clay." These in turn become part of what the poet envisions as the great procession of the dead--"Sometimes I see alone / coffins under sail"--that will include everyone, from the most romantically inclined (pensive young girls) to their pragmatic, commonsensical husbands (notary publics). The first key to the weirdly logical nature of the imagery, I think, comes in those astonishing lines: death is inside the bones, like a barking where there are no dogs, coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere, growing in the damp air like tears or rain. Neruda presents the sound the animals make, the barking, but takes away the origin of that sound, the dogs themselves. The sound seems all the more haunting since it comes from absent dogs in an indistinguishable place--a churchyard perhaps--and seeps, as if naturally, into the air like tears--product of human grief--or rain--a mere atmospheric condition. So, too, he paradoxically asserts that death has a sound, which is silence. The imagery goes into full operation in the fourth stanza: Death arrives among all that sound like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it, comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no finger in it, comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no throat. In this sequence of images, Neruda repeatedly presents a human object but withdraws the human presence from it. He posits a shoe, but takes away the foot that wears it, he presents a suit, but withdraws the man who would inhabit it. Death comes and knocks, but it uses a ring without a stone or a finger, it shouts but without a voice. The progression--it shouts "with no mouth, with no tongue, with no throat"--mimics a process of taking a voice away in stages. These images all incarnate the paradox of a presence that is absence. "Nevertheless," he writes, using a logical proposition as in a poem by Donne or Marvell, "its steps can be heard / and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree." Neruda has created an imagery for something which is present but cannot be seen--something mysterious, indistinct, real.
[ Czech; tr Lynn Coffin, from Elegies ] My friends have left. Far away, my darling is asleep. Outside, it's as dark as pitch. I'm saying words to myself, words that are white in the lamplight and when I'm half-asleep I begin to think about my mother. Autumnal recollection. Really, under the cover of winter, it's as if I know everything--even what my mother is doing now. She's at home, in the kitchen. She has a small child's stove toward which the wooden rocking horse can trot, she has a small child's stove, the sort nobody uses today, but she basks in its heat. Mother. My diminutive mom. She sits quietly, hands folded, and thinks about my father, who died years ago. And then she is skinning fruit for me. I am in the room. Sitting right next to her. You've got to see us, God, you bully, who took so much. How dark it is outside! What was I going to say? Oh, yes, now I remember. Because of all those hours I slept soundly, through calm nights, because of all those loved ones who are deep in dreams--Now, when everything's running short, I can't stand being here by myself. The lamplight's too strong. I am sowing grain on the headland. I will not live long. W. B. Yeats once said, "Rhetoric is a quarrel with others; poetry is a quarrel with oneself," and Orten's poem seems to inscribe that self-challenging notion of the lyric. From the beginning, "A Small Elegy" dramatically establishes that the speaker--a stand-in for the poet--is by himself talking to himself. He was with other people, but now he is completely alone--his friends gone, his beloved sleeping elsewhere, unconscious, far away. The speaker is the sole operating consciousness mourning in a world where everyone else is asleep. Against the pitch-black darkness he starts saying things to himself, using white words, which I take to mean words that have a kind of unselfconscious purity about them. He daydreams about his mother--an "autumnal recollection"-- and that in turn moves him back toward his childhood home where his mother seems still to preside--diminished now--over an outmoded world. She is smaller, more vulnerable, someone to be protected. "Matku," he says tenderly in Czech, "Mon maminku," my little mommy, which the translator has rendered as "my diminutive mom." He imagines that after all these years she's still sitting back there, quietly uncomplaining, thinking about his father who died so long ago. It is the next moment in the poem, when the tense radically changes, that I find especially compelling. "And then she is skinning fruit for me," he says, "I am in / the room. Sitting right next to her." He doesn't say "And then she was skinning fruit for me," but instead finds himself catapulted into the past as a living present. This is an instance of what Proust called "involuntary memory," when the entire world of the past comes flooding back. It is not something willfully recalled, but something that comes unbidden--suddenly, radically, overwhelmingly present. He has been wrenched out of one time into another. The amplitude of his feeling is nearly unbearable and he starts shaking his fist at God, using a child's language, calling him a ''bully" because now he is aware that God has taken away so much, because so much is lost. "How / dark it is outside!" he exclaims. And then he asks: "What was I going to say?" The sudden colliding of worlds, of the past and the present, create a gap in his mind--and thus in the text. He can't recall what he was going to say next because the experience is dislocating, the outer darkness bewildering. He has lost himself in time. And then he recovers: "Oh, yes, now I remember." And he then proceeds with the ruthlessness of a logical proposition to face what can no longer be evaded. "Because / of all those hours I slept soundly, through calm / nights," he declares--that is, because of all those nights when he was safe and unconscious--"because of all the loved ones who are deep / in dreams"--that is, because of all those who are unconscious now, unaware of the peril that surrounds them--he realizes that time is running out and announces: "I can't stand being here by myself. The lamplight's too strong." Here the lamplight becomes the emblem of a consciousness that is too much to bear, an isolation that is killing: I am sowing grain on the headland. I will not live long. The recognition here is that what he is planting is endangered, imperiled, vulnerable. What he plants he will not be able to protect. The sowing of grain on the headland is his last gesture, his way of putting a message in a bottle when he knows he won't last much longer. The poem concludes with a terrible recognition. When I read it, my impulse is to wake up everyone around me--everyone l love--before it is too late. Jiri Orten [Ji\^r\'i] belonged to a generation of poets who took Czech verse in a more inward direction. He did not shrink from his own subjectivity, from what he knew. "A Small Elegy" inscribes... the premonition of a death that was indeed coming for him. Orten died in a bizarre accident in Prague in the summer of 1941. One moment he was stepping off the curb to buy cigarettes from a local kiosk, the next MBT he was hit and being dragged along the street by a speeding German car. He was refused admission to a nearby hospital because he was Jewish. Another admitted him, but it was too late. He died a few days later. He was only twenty-two years old. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that poetry is "what will and must be spoken." It is a secret that can no longer be kept secret, a way of knowing.
review by Jonathan Wilson on new york times Here comes Edward Hirsch, prizewinning poet and teacher at the University of Houston, to instruct us on How to Read a Poem, with the alluring guarantee that we will Fall in Love With Poetry. But Hirsch isn't writing for everybody; his imagined readers are young college students, those willing but poetry-ignorant ephebes of the new millennium who can't tell dactyl from duende. The literary how-to book, an unlikely genre, appears to be emerging on the back of Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life to challenge the vulgar hegemony of its megaselling demon other, the unliterary how-to book. Poetry is obviously a tough sell, and ... the anxiety that he's got an unmarketable product on his hands frequently results in... hyperbole. passages are galvanizing and conclusions earth-shattering. ; lyric poetry has not simply an intimacy but a profound intimacy; not joy but deep joy or pure Mozartian joy is felt. ... Hirsch is an intelligent reader of poems, his range is wide and his choice of poems engaging, but his desperate need to turn student readers on and make his subject sexy does not lead to the palace of wisdom. ---bio Hirsch is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including "Wild Gratitude," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also published four prose books, among them "How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, "a national best seller. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, and publishes regularly in a wide variety of magazines and journals, including "The" "American Poetry Review" and "The New Yorker," A longtime teacher in the creative writing program at the University of Houston, he is now the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in New York City.