Walk Around: Essays on Poetry and Place by David Blair (Mad Hat Press)
Why Should I Write A Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949-58, edited by Graziano Krätli (University of New mexico Press)
Three Talks and The Lives of the Poems by Joshua Beckman (Wave Books)
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The mercurial narratives in David Blair’s poetry collection Arsonville (2016) are not only frequently situated in or recall named locations but depend on them critically for creative nutrition. Blair doesn’t just write about places, he plunders them. If a place seems memorably stocked with the actual, then he can speculate about it with brio, can become a speculative spirit. “There’s some sort of reunion / of haters in a desolate part of the Philadelphia airport,” he writes in “My Philadelphia,” a poem so contentious and hyperactive that only by locking on its location does it keep from skidding off the runway into the weeds. Its loquacity is comedic but not of the strictly charming variety. Blair leaps around so vigorously and unpredictably that his face is blurred — in order to know him you’ve got to keep up. It’s worth the trip.
In a sense, the nine essays in Walk Around operate like decelerated versions of his poems. But his prose retains much of his impetuous vivacity. Blair is a flâneur of poetry precincts, namely any public space he happens to enter. He speaks of “the peripatetic everything in the senses” – as if a poet by definition is someone who can’t sit still. In “Remarks on Walking Around Boston,” he says, “When you walk, you do something that writers need to do to make their poems. You get out of your own way. You become less self-conscious. Maybe you get beyond your preconceived notions of yourself. Maybe you get to what you really care about.”
But there is nothing serene about Blair’s walks — or his probes of place in Arsonville. He is likely to be found walking away and critiquing over his shoulder. Blair doesn’t stop to gaze; the mind, the language, and the feet keep moving. Among the notable walkers he mentions in Walk Around are Dr. Williams, Lorca, and Auden. “Thinking while walking can enact both the recapturing of memories and the relinquishing of the past,” he says. This puts me in mind of the distressed Rilke, walking around Paris in 1902, and these lines from “A Walk”:
So we are grasped, by that which we could not grasp,
at such great distance, so fully manifest—
and it changes us, even when we do not reach it,
into something that, hardly sensing it, we already are.
Blair has not produced a set of prototypical craft essays for Walk Around – his mode relies on the adventitious, and his style itself is the crafty acumen he teaches. But he does have his pedagogical moments, mainly in opposition to “institutional” poetic output. “In Jazz Vocalists, Other Vocalists, Poetry, and the Technologies of Voice,” he begins with an appreciation of Ella Fitzgerald’s recordings, pokes fun at those poets who “sing or even warble at readings,” and finally arrives at his serious critique: “Most of the language I’m hearing these days seems to come with no demand at all except the Elvis demand: ‘Love me’ … Perhaps because I have a streak of lousy in me, I don’t like being reminded of the poet in the middle of the poem, his or her neediness for admiration, even sympathy, all poking through and getting in the way of the poem, not unless that is what the poems do, too. Then it’s impolite not to feel moved because I feel the vibration in the air of something repeated and allowed in advance, ugh, disturbing.” After “not unless,” he seems to be making allowances for undistinguished poems about difficult conditions, perhaps a lapse in his otherwise uncompromising standards.
An essay on the later work of Seamus Heaney and Tomaž Šalamun offers brisk insights. On Heaney: “From early on, Heaney had a sense that culture was something at least in part to fend off. The thing I want to think about – Heaney’s relationship to American poetry – is difficult because Heaney, in his deepest resources when he speaks about what did and did not influence his art, is defensive. He protects his sources, or maybe he tried not to give them more thought than would have been useful for him.” And: “Šalamun is one of those poets who remind you that your disreputable sources are not only your best ones, but also the ones that you have to burn, your language, love, and freedom.”
Then, in “Ode to Mentality, or Poetry Needs Weird Subjectivity,” Blair returns to the necessity of “non-institutional humanity” such as expressed in the work of Alan Dugan. “If I had to define institutional imagination,” he writes, “I would say that it is what none of us entirely can escape any more than we would live without ethics or love, but which also hems us in with caution, vanity and convention.” Then comes his list of 10 dreaded “modes of the expected,” comprising a challenge to artless conventionality (regardless of the earnestness of its plea or complaint). The modes begin with:
#1 — Subject is way more important than anything else, including language, seriously thesis-driven.
and
#6 — Preaches to choir rather than risking gray-areas, subversive or satirical styles that could be misconstrued or resented for a cloven foot.
To quote a line or two from a Blair essay is not only to scant its pivots and asides, but to fail to describe how his seemingly wayward impulses manage to cobble together, in the end, an ethos. He keeps walking until he gets there, even if “there” turns out to be where he started from. His essay on Lowell begins with a few observations on Katie Peterson’s editing of a recent New and Selected, but quickly veers off to anecdotes about his own experience with the poems over time. There are also assessments: “… the thing about Lowell being personal is that he writes to people recognizing their complexity, and he never creates the impression that he just writes about them without calling into question his own detachment.”
His point about Lowell, like much else in his essays, is to favor the pleasures we experience from the ways things don’t quite fit together. But as he suggests in point #1 above, this isn’t mainly a matter of matter. The deeper disunity, the disturbance, must radiate from the poem’s intelligence and guts. Like Groucho Marx, Blair stands in opposition to any institutional club that would offer membership. He tells us something essential about the poet’s relation to the reader (or other poets) that is routinely ignored: having relation is not necessarily to be in accord but always to be humane, if somewhat goofy.
The reason why I enjoy my imaginary strolls alongside David Blair, as he tells stories about his former roommates or explains his ongoing interest in Mean Streets or Bringing Up Baby, is that his approach is companionable – and made vulnerable by dishevelments of expression in his prose which I find endearing. One day I may get to tell him why these lines from his “Poem About Mailboxes” in Arsonville stick with me:
There was an alcoholic sadness
in the winter garage doors
open to fly rods.
[Published March 25, 2019 by Mad Hat Press, 99 pages, $19.95 papeback]
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“I am a student of engineering, and Indian, and 21,” Srinivas Rayaprol wrote to William Carlos Williams on October 22, 1949. “I am terribly confused because I want to write poetry and when I return to India within the next year I’ll have to make a choice. Or can one connect like you?” Rayaprol had recently arrived at Stanford to study engineering – but he also enrolled in Yvor Winters’ writing workshop. “He does not approve of my poems,” continued Rayaprol. “I do not approve of his theories.” Yet it was through Winters’ Primitivism and Decadence (1937), which quotes in full poems such as “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital,” that Rayaprol discovered and was inspired by Williams’ work.
The spectre of Winters was ample bait to reel in Williams’ response. A few days later he wrote to Rayaprol, “Winters is an old acquaintance, by letter … I disagree with him top and bottom as heartily as you seem to. His very intelligence seems to unseat him … To fix one’s self on the standard neo-classic metres is to destroy the whole basis of present day opportunity. You are aware of this and therefore you distrust Winters.”
Some 34 letters from Williams to Rayaprol, apparently the whole of that side of the dialogue, and 20 letters from Rayaprol (some have not been located) comprise Why Should I Write A Poem Now. Their correspondence continued through 1959. The book’s editor, Graziano Krätli, a translator and librarian at Yale University, also provides the poems Rayaprol included with his letters, his letters to James Laughlin at New Directions, and the tables of contents of East and West, the literary magazine Rayaprol published in India from 1956 to 1959.
Rayaprol arrived at Stanford just two years after India gained its independence from Britain where most Indian writers, scholars and professionals-to-be went if they desired to be schooled outside of their country. But Rayaprol looked further west. Although he wrote heroic couplets to please Winters, he yearned for a more immediate mode of expression that could align with his aspirations for the new India to which he returned in 1953. In the Bay Area, he encountered the San Francisco poetry renaissance. Reading his often wistful letters which expressed a struggle to write poems, I thought of Williams’ statement about “the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses.” Rayaprol alludes to his “bitterness against the environment which gave birth to me,” to which Williams offers advice and consolation — but perhaps the residue of colonialism, the shock of the modern, and the legacy of Indian literary habits weighed so heavily on the young writer groping for an idiom of his own that Williams’ counsel alone could not help him. “Such is my life here,” he wrote on March 15, 1957. “Unsatisfactory in most respects and generally unhappy … But I am 30 years old, have a wife and a couple of kids and a mission to do in life, only sometimes I wish I was just left alone.”
Rayaprol’s father was an established poet, and both father and son emerged from a classical Sanskrit tradition. Clearly, Rayaprol heard encouragement Williams that was not forthcoming from his father. Rayaprol also solicited new work for East and West; Williams contributed to two issues.
William’s letters are generously outfitted with illuminating remarks about his own creative efforts and the poetry business, such as in this excerpt from March 19, 1951:
“Tomorrow I go to Yale to read to the students. I have been reading more and more as time goes on. The women especially treat me as though I were candy, to be mounted on a stick and eaten. I’m not sure that I want to read to miscellaneous audiences even though they pay me rather well for it. I feel the old rebelliousness arising again: if I am so easy to swallow there must be something beginning to be wrong with me. I am either growing dull or lazy.”
Although Rayaprol is more likely to reveal his anxieties, Dr. Williams can also offer glimpses of his life:
“I am too tired to read your last poem, it would be ridiculous of me to try. I have been out two nights in a row attending to an old woman who was trying to die and could not make it. Finally last night she put it over after a long unconscious struggle with the sheer strength of her heart. It wasn’t even sad. But she had been such a heroic creature, blind and deaf for years, that it froze the mind to watch the process. There was absolutely nothing intelligible about it. Her devoted daughter and I sat there while her harsh mechanical breathing went on at the rate of 32 [beats] a minute and talked about her past in quiet unemotional voices for an hour.”
Rayaprol’s most fertile period as a poet may have occurred during his Stanford term and the years that immediately followed during which he strove to bring global literary modernity to India through his magazine. His first collection of poems appeared in 1968. A selected collection was published in 1995, just before his death. Williams’ generous counsel must have buoyed him for years. “Until you establish your personal rhythm by some successful or at least accepted verse you’ll be like a Mason who comes to the Lodge door without the password,” Williams wrote. “But the artist wishes to enter because he is himself.” The most moving parts of Rayaprol’s letters express his struggle to pass through that door.
[Published on December 1, 2018 by the University of New Mexico Press, 240 pages, $65.00 hardcover]
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“I want an investigative writing – experience and finding out as part of the speaking,” says Joshua Beckman in “On Books” (2014), one of three lectures collected in Three Talks. “Why would I say it if I think I know it?” He certainly knows a lot about poetry, but he also wants his lectures to suggest incipience: “I couldn’t, after all, stand up and tell you everything I’ve been thinking, and yet being with books sort of encouraged just that” — a posture reminding me of Miles Davis who insisted that every urgently emerging note must be played without restrictions – yet he always met the strict spatial requirements of recording on vinyl. Everything fit just so. Same with Beckman: he digresses and accommodates the serendipitous within the parameters of an ethos crystallized over the past 20 years.
“A purposeful tactical writing feels odd,” he writes, and though he doesn’t spell out the attributes of such writing, he does specify the antidote in “The Friend, The Stranger & The Anonymous Spirit” (2014): “… poems made like drawing a magnet through one’s living day to see what form the filings take – the magnetizing of self – and (and with) others – always some social sense of being in the poems made – the act of it temporary and uneventful (or really, maybe, temporary and mostly eventful) – not understanding of being in the world – but inquisitive enactment of hows and whys –”
“Friendship’s continual presence” in a poem, marked by the modesty and even slighting of the first-person, opens the way to the “communal” – a sufficiency quite different from “tactical writing” that explicitly addresses social issues and interpersonal friction or empathy. As the boundaries between op-ed, memoir and poetry collapse, persuasion and argument direct and erect the poems – not that Beckman indicts this trend, but its goal-orientation falls outside his preferred attributes. He asserts, “I’m proposing that if one leads with the intellect one can find oneself done with the poem (some way or another, soon enough), and that being done can be a kind of betrayal of the poem.”
Beckman expresses an unflagging allegiance to the provisional and “the energies of intuitive choice” such that “at any point in a poem the next word can really be any word at all, and there is some energy of that constant possibility that I believe poems maintain … So that in you there is this multitude of formal possibility …” The poets he cites underscore this desire for fluidity and spontaneity – Basho, Clare, Pessoa, Stein, then on to Creeley, Kyger, Whalen, Welch, Eigner, Blackburn and Wieners.
In The Lives of the Poems, which Wave Books packages together with Three Talks, Beckman bears down on the actual making of his poems. The speaking in these three lectures is rhapsodic, unburdened by assessments or conclusions. He recalls the poems’ original impulses, the effects he sought, and the flow of process (which seems to take precedence over – but not subvert — the establishment of ideas):
“Understanding the poem – there is a kind of death imposed on the poem by those who try and understand it completely – even just the understanding impulse includes some desire to be done – some desire to complete the experience – that one might get on to new experiences – new poems – but there is something inherently indiscreet about a meaningful poem – it is in yourself or someone else or the world making meaning, and meaningful things are always in motion – by the very nature of us (as people) finding them that way –”
When someone asks Beckman what his poems are like, he answers with an example such as this:
made poems
from actual things
shadow falling
wall with black wings
of blackbird flap
on bunch of
big dry straw
like a play
Beckman’s emphasis on the making of poems and the life that courses through them comes as a relief from the rabid rush to publish via Submittable. His abiding confidence in the capaciousness of human creativity points to an infinity of potential. In his introduction to Three Talks, he notes that his poor health profoundly affected the shape of the lectures. He had no access to his books “so it should not be very surprising that these talks are more full of ramble and search than find.” Beckman’s talks and poetry are based on what he perceives spontaneously in things when they are encountered in the moment – and his confidence in doing so, despite his illness, does not allow for a tragic sensibility. If poetry is an art that expresses unease at the limitations of institutionalized thought and operates among neighbors who have lost a feel for the totality of human experience, it is also the memory of that loss and works to reestablish contact with the actual. So perhaps I’m mistaken about Beckman’s exclusion of the tragic. Maybe it can be found in the halting breath represented by all those dashes.
[Three Talks and The Lives of the Poems, published May 1, 2018 by Wave Books, 59 and 69 pages respectively, $25.00 for the pair]