by
Robert Hass
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[...] We have lived in a catastrophic time. The redundancy of violence and suffering, the sheer immensity of the danger, always threatens to wither the imagination, to make us turn back to the purely personal, as if it were somehow more real because the mind can, at least, compass it, whereas the effort to think about the fate of the planet, about what man is that he has done to himself all the terrible things that he has in this century, comes to us mostly as dark and private musings. And it is just this that Jeffers sought in the verse of his short poems, an art to speak those musings largely, to claim for poetry the clarity and largeness of mind needed to compass the madness.
From his point of view, to be seen always in political terms was particularly ironic because his argument with Marxism, indeed with the modern world, was that it had pinned the wrong kind of hope on politics. He had been, as he records in his autobiography, attracted to Marxism as a young man not so much because of its millenarian dream, but because it was based on the idea that the world was made not out of freedom, but out of necessity and power. In the end, this view of the world, though it had the look of frank realism, seemed to a mind like his, steeped in both Christianity and Polish Romanticism, servile, and its promise of some realm of absolute justice seemed a failure of the religious imagination. Or, to say it another way, it valued becoming more than it valued being. He believed that justice was a continuous struggle in human societies, not an absolute that the world was evolving toward. And therefore he didn’t think it was the end of history that mattered or its processes, but its individual moments. It was being, the very fact of the existence of things, that always seemed to him to be mysterious, to be the place where the meaning of existence—mute, perhaps, specific beyond the power of language, singular, not quite graspable—lay.
interesting
[...] In the twentieth century terrorism became, largely through the innovations of aerial bombardment by airplane and guided missile, the principal means by which states waged war. Hiroshima is, in that way, the century’s hinge. It was a straightforward terrorist attack on the civilian population of two Japanese cities, designed to break the will to fight of the Japanese government. In that one way it is not different in kind from the stateless terrorism practiced by al-Qaeda or the insurgent Sunni rebellion in Iraq. [...]
[...] The synoptic Gospels, after all, belong to the eternity of story, as Yeats’s golden bird does. They are full of legends of the marvels of this world: the curing of lepers, the multiplication of loaves and fishes, the man who walked on water and died and rose from the dead. Though these same stories appear in John, it contains what the others do not—that astonishing leap to what is not figurable in human art, not tellable: the Word that was in the beginning and was with God and was God. This is not Jewish eschatology with its chairs in Paradise. It is something else that pulls away from the earth, wants to leave it behind. And clearly it speaks to a very deep place in the human imagination.
Writers know a version of it, because all art drives toward either representation or abstraction, or tries to negotiate the tension between them; it wants to render the thing and to be its pure essence, and never quite succeeds at either, fails to render human experience entirely, fails to soar free of its materials. Logos and kosmos. [...]
idk it's just pretty
In Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem about Richard Cory, who is the envy of everyone in his New England town and in the last line of the short poem blows his brains out, we come to understand that people are not their public presentation, that their relationship to their own existence is something we may or may not be getting a glimpse of. And we may begin to be more observant and to imagine our way into their lives. [...]
i was legitimately shocked by the revelation
There are poems of not-knowing that are, for me, very connected to this and have the same quality. One of my favorite haiku is by Basho, who is a poet I think of as actually having many connections to Emily Dickinson. It’s a poem that takes the classic, almost cliché subject of the haiku, the middle high part of the autumn season—the phrase in Japanese is aki fukaki, usually translated “deep autumn” or “autumn deepens,” and there are many such poems: “deep autumn the leaves are falling . . .” “deep autumn even now the quinces . . . ,” deep autumn this and that; the poem of Basho’s on this subject goes:
Deep autumn—
my neighbor,
how does he live, I wonder?
Paraphrasing haiku, I know, is like explaining jokes; it’s a sort of hopeless enterprise. But what is deeply moving to me about this poem is the way it gets whatever it is in our bodies that groans with gorgeous and painful knowledge in the turning of the year. And it gets the feeling of separateness from other people that accompanies it. And the longing to be connected back to them. Or an awakened curiosity about them, as if, waking to the fact that there are other people with other lives, the speaker in the poem has a sudden taste of his own self, of his having one and being one. Both these poems borrow on long religious traditions. One might not think so, but to speak of “deep autumn” in the Buddhist tradition is to speak of a fundamental idea about nature, that it is impermanent and contingent, as much as talking about light recalls the Gospel of John for a Christian—both of them are poems of essential loneliness that have in them a long experience of religion and a longing for it and a deep separateness from it. And what they have pledged themselves to, as a representation of spirituality, is the work of imagination.
And what we make of it he leaves mostly to us. It would be easy, from his own eloquent prose, to get the impression that his vision is essentially moral, or from what has been written about him that his images were elegy or prophetic lament. But none of those things seem to me the final effect of his art. Things change, after all. We live our lives, each of us with differing but usually deep attachments to place or to an idea of place, while forces larger than our lives are changing those places faster than we live them out. There may be places in America, old neighborhoods in Cincinnati or Buffalo, the hilly farm country of southern Missouri, the red dirt and pine forests of southeast Mississippi, that have not changed much in our lifetime. But for most Americans change and loss are part of the landscape we hold in mind and have anesthetized ourselves to. Many of the forces of change have been destructive. Some, at least, have made a possible life for people excluded from the pastoral romance of an earlier republic. It’s our task to make of this as we can what we can. But first we have to be able to see it.
[...] I remember an experience of standing in the library in my freshmen year of college and picking up T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and reading in it and feeling complete incomprehension and a desire to be able to comprehend it or to find someone who could explain it to me, open it up for me, so intense it felt like physical nausea. Even though I didn’t know what it was that I thought was in that poem. Not so much “life,” perhaps, but knowledge of it and its great mysteries, love and sex and death and the amorphous and puzzling self and the meanings of suffering and injustice and the nature of things. Drawn to poetry by these strong but somewhat undefinable impulses, also perhaps by the fact that putting words down on paper and composing phrases in my mind seemed like something I could actually do, I came to the writing of poetry and the reading of poetry at more or less the same time, and I took to it, entered its territory more or less poem by poem, as this or that poem—lifeless words on a page—came alive for me. So it was very much my impulse in the teaching of poetry to pass on to my students in the classroom that experience, and so teaching poetry for me has been mostly about reflecting on what makes particular poems come alive to me and trying to convey that experience to others.
In talking about this with Judith, I was able to quote a haiku that I love by the nineteenth-century poet Kobayashi Issa, which goes like this—seventeen syllables in the Japanese:
The man pulling radishes
Pointed my way
With a radish.
Can you imagine the situation? The narrator of the poem is hiking along a road. He stops and asks for directions. And the fellow working in the field waves his radish—it’s a daikon, one of those long skinny Japanese radishes—and says, “Oh, it’s about four miles down the road on the left.” That’s my image of myself teaching poetry: I was the guy with the radish.
I could say to students: if you substitute imagination for love, you have in hand one of Wallace Stevens’s persistent thoughts about the world, and our experience of it, and the nature of knowledge. Bronze then becomes a word to think about, the bronzes of autumnal New England and the sun-gilded bronzes of the tropics. We live, the poem muses, in a bronze décor. And it contains a sort of final palm tree, and a horizon, because in the imagination, which is really no space and no time, there are nevertheless horizons. So one could say that postmodernism has not so much superseded Romanticism in this poem as swallowed it. Probably that bird in the palm with its fire-fangled feathers is the sun seen through palm leaves. It could be the sun coming up or the sun going down; you can’t tell. In the imagination it could be both, and the fact that this was one of his last poems gives this ambiguity another resonance. To notice all this is to put someone’s state of mind—or someone’s construction of the fiction of a state of mind, that of a man who’s worked at poetry his entire life, haunted by the mystery of whether language can get hold of existence at all—to put that poem, its breath, its second thoughts, its strange metaphor, into other people’s possession. Something like this is surely the gift poetry gives us and that, teaching poetry, we give to others.