In From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Walter Kaufman wrote, “One learns to ask about every philosophy and every religion, and about great poets and artists, too: What is it that they praise?”
At the same time, his poets and artists showed him that we are not at home in the world we praise. He quoted Nietzsche from The Will to Power: “Existence is considered sacred enough to justify even a tremendous amount of suffering.” Rilke said that the poem’s vocation is “to show the identity of terribleness and bliss” – but this only clarified the formidable emotional and technical issues faced by a lyric poet. In Rilke’s work, Kaufman observed, “Again and again the mood and the verve must sustain the lines, and the lines fail to sustain the mood.”
Grace Schulman is not only a poet of praise, but one who addresses the grounding questions of this mode. How and why do we find beauty in adversity? Here is one of her most recent poems:
CELEBRATION
Seeing, in April, hostas unfurl like arias,
and tulips, white cups inscribed with licks of flame,
gaze feverish, grown almost to my waist,
and the oak raise new leaves for benediction,
I mourn for what does not come back: the movie theater—
reels spinning out vampire bats, last trains,
the arc of Chaplin’s cane, the hidden doorways—
struck down for a fast-food store; your rangy stride;
my shawl of hair; my mother’s grand piano.
My mother.
How to make it new,
how to find the gain in it? Ask the sea
at sunrise how a million sparks can fly
over dead bones.
Schulman has published six books of poems since Burn Down the Icons (1976, Princeton), but First Loves and Other Adventures is her first collection of essays. Most of the essays are tributes, short pieces and reviews that praise the source of her pleasure. “As a poet I find mystery to be vital still, running only a close second to praise,” she writes, “and perhaps the two are linked in expressions of awe. I think of Auden: ‘Teach the free man how to praise.’ Rilke: ‘Ich rühme.’ Hopkins: ‘He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.’”
The collection’s anchor piece is “Helen,” Schulman’s most personal essay and a key to her poetics. “Helen” recalls Schulman’s youth (she was born in 1935) during and immediately after World War II, and the disasporic migrations of her family from Poland. She begins:
“In my childhood, there was no actual peril. I wore starched pinafores, ate turkey with an attentive family, and lived in New York only a walk from the Hayden Planetarium. On Saturdays, I was taken to Carnegie Hall. I went to good schools and expected to go to college. All the same, I sensed that some demon waited to destroy us all.”
Helen Waldman, Schulman’s aunt, remained in Poland to practice medicine and died in the Jewish ghetto. An Auschwitz survivor said that he had seen Helen “climb the tower of a municipal building, run to the ledge, and pull down the Polish flag from its staff … before she was shot down by a Nazi guard.” This act triggers Schulman’s sense of the hero as one who “holds fast to some permanent value beyond our practical needs.” The impractical artist finds a place among these heroes since she creates order (her poem) out of the miserable chaos. She does not reflect beauty as much as make it possible.
There is nothing quite as resonant and layered or as self-illuminating as “Helen” in First Loves and Other Adventures, but everything else is true to that opening essay’s spirit and point of view, and the book’s brief memoirs are especially affecting. She extols the achievements of May Swenson, Marianne Moore, and Muriel Rukeyser (she has written a book on Moore). There is a fine analysis of Octavio Paz’s work: “The poetry of Octavio Paz is an urgent matter because it insists on the wholeness of life, love, and nations, a unity that only art can reveal … The truth I see darkly … is the basic fact of lost unity and ‘how vulnerable it is / to be women and men, the glory it is to be man.’” She reflects on biblical poetry and tells the story of Walt Whitman’s visit as a reporter at age twenty-three to a synagogue in lower Manhattan in 1842.
In “Sylvia Plath at Yaddo,” Schulman works to prove that the landscape of Yaddo shows up as material in Plath’s Colossus poems. Her point is not academic. Rather, she has something important to say about “description” in poetry, and the moral significance of Whitman’s statement that “all truths wait in things.”
Schulman was the poetry editor at The Nation from 1972-2006, but despite the length of her tenure she does not reflect on the experience in these essays nor does she offer a perspective on the span of American poetry during that period. Her tastes often seemed too narrow for a magazine with a contentiously energetic point of view like The Nation — especially when compared to choices made by Denise Levertov who edited poetry for The Nation in 1961 and 1963-1965. To compare the vastly different dynamics in their respective essays is a topic for another day.
The collection concludes with two observant and fond reminiscences of Léonie Adams (Schulman’s teacher at Columbia) and Richard Yates, estrangement from whom “was foreordained.” About Adams she writes, “She strikes dread, reverence, terror, tirelessly exploring the natural world, and, at the same time, intimates mysteries beyond it. I remember most her contrasts: modesty and passion; fierce dedication and gentle humor; privacy and concern for others.” There could be no truer description of Schulman herself.
[Published by University of Michigan Press on January 15, 2010. 155 pages, $60.00 / $24.95. Published via the “Poets on Poetry” series of the University of Michigan Press, Annie Finch and Marilyn Hacker, general editors.]
On These Adventures
Some comparisons are more unpleasant than some others of course — and of course I shouldn’t want to draw any more from a painful experience — but it occurs to me that Ms Schulman has retained her heroic aunt’s near-impossible bravery, in her championing of the spirit. A wonderful thing it is to know that such people exist so truly (and so well). Thank you again for these reviews.