MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH POETRY

jan van munster

Two years of reading difficult writing for an average high school graduate was my preparation for college. Out of the Navy, into school, I liked the English class the best, introducing poetry that was awfully interesting to a kid with no experience in poetry but Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Turns out, I'd recommend them for introductions. They speak in our language. I found a paperback of Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems in the first week of school. Back in my one-room attic apartment, after homework, I thought I'd read a few of the poems before sleep. No sleep happened. I could not stop reading, read them all and read them all again and again. All night long I lay in the bed, head propped on pillow, reading his poems. They spoke to me. I was in awe of what he was doing with the form. My knowledge of poetry was negligible beyond a few of the Beats. Jeffers was like the next step. I have beside me a small Modern Library, 1935 edition, of The Roan Stallion, Tamar And Other Poems, by Jeffers. Probably found it someplace for fifty cents. Just now read one of his poems selected randomly, Pelicans. Reading just one of his poems after not reading him in a very long time, I see the original attraction to his writing. I like the connections he makes and what he sees in what he's looking at. Thus began a lifetime affection for poetry. 

jan van munster

Several years of reading Twentieth Century American poetry, and poetry from Europe and Asia, I came to a place that when I want to read a poem or a few, I go to an anthology of Chinese poetry, Sunflower Splendor, from beginning to 1975, the date of publication, several translators.  This is my desert island book. Chinese poetry satisfies me like no other. My favorites were written over a millennium ago. Tu Fu lived from 712-770. Han Yu lived from 768 to 824. Han Yu wrote a long poem I've read many times, Southern Mountains. These are the mountains of southern China, semi-tropical. I'd like to show you the whole poem, though will pick a few lines:

          Winter comes with somber silence,

           Ice and snow sculpting in white jade.

           A new sun lights the summits

           Stretching heights and breadths millions of feet.

I've loved this anthology so much, I bought the hardback edition first, then the paperback edition, to save the hardback for later years and wear out the paperback along the way. 

jan van munster

Sunflower Splendor is such a treasure, I needed a shelf copy and a copy for use. I have four copies of the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching, different editions. Favorite is the one illustrated with ancient Chinese paintings. And there is John Berryman's book of poems, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 1968, I keep near at hand. Sometimes I want to read a Berryman poem, pick it up, read one, savor it and go on. And from that same time, I recall devouring Robert Lowell's book of poems, Notebook 1967-68. It was in the same time as Norman Mailer's Armies Of The Night and Robert Bly's long poem, The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last, a poem of the American war in Vietnam. I'd heard Bly read it in person, bought a cassette tape of him reading it. Have read it again recently in his new and selected poems, Stealing Sugar From The Castle, released last year. Bly is another of the poets I pick up and read one or two and put it down. I read Bly an awful lot in the late Sixties, early Seventies. Haven't read him much at all since around 1980. Found his selected poems published, and like his later poems quite a lot better than the earlier poems. Not throwing off on the early ones, like Light Around The Body, not at all, but saying he's gone beyond in his maturity. 

jan van munster

I've picked up Louise Gluck's book of collected poems, Poems 1962-2012. Gluck I've followed since her first book of poems, Firstborn. I was glad to see her poems together in one volume. It's so thick, it's kind of intimidating, so much to pick from. I don't like to read poetry books front to back, unless it would be Lowell's, Notebook 67-68. I wanted to touch Louise Gluck's book to pick it up and open it. I let it fall open randomly and read the poem it opened to, Lullaby, p 299, from her book, The Wild Iris, a poem called Lullaby. I want to share three of the lines with you:

Twilight, then early evening. Fireflies

in the room, flickering here and there, here and there,

and summer's deep sweetness filling the open window. 

Reading the entire poem took my breath away. Her poems frequently take hold of me in such a way I inhale and exhale when it is finished, thinking, Where did that come from? It is the same feeling when I stand in front of Robert Motherwell's Elegy To The Spanish Republic, or Monet's water lilies. The kind of thing that makes me say to self, This is the real deal, this is art. I'm recalling a show I saw of Jaap Mooy's drawings by felt-tip black marker, every one of them an astonishment, black squiggles on white. Couldn't stop staring them, had to buy a copy of the paperback book of the show in the gift shop. Gluck's poems do for me what Jaap Mooy's simple drawings did, each one awe inspiring. 

jan van munster himself

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READING THE POEMS OF LOUISE GLUCK

robert motherwell

Today I gave myself a rare treat, one I did not know was necessary until it happened. It's been so relentlessly cold the last few days and nights, I needed to be warm, relaxed and warm. My neighbors who are away right now have a house across the road. I needed some time to sit back with a book in a warm house and I wanted a hot bath. Put clothes in the washing machine and ran the bath water as hot as I could take it, filled the tub as high as it would go without overflowing when I sat down, remembering I displace more water now than in the past. I'd pre-heated the house, making it comfortable. The floor was warm enough to walk barefoot. It would not do to take a hot bath in a cold room with a cold floor. Today I was taking a time-out from the cold. I sat down in the tub and the water rose appreciably. Feet were glowing warm in a short time, blood circulation. Warm feet was the greatest blessing of all. It felt like sitting in a sauna, the heat even all over. Almost nodded off a few times. I wanted to stay in the water on and on, but it started cooling down after a good while. I was surprised at how well the tub held the water's heat. I started getting restless. Dried off, dressed and went to the living room, sat on a warm sofa and picked up the book I'd brought to spend some time in the warm with, Louise Gluck's, Poems 1962-2012. Gluck requires close attention, focus, from word to word. She's a tight, compact poet who uses every word deliberately. Maybe I read a dozen poems, each of them half a dozen times, reading them over and over until I felt the flow of the language and followed the progression freely. From one of several poems titled Matins:

 

                          are you like the hawthorn tree,

          always the same thing in the same place,

          or are you more the foxglove, inconsistent, first springing up

          a pink spike on the slope behind the daisies,

          and the next year, purple in the rose garden?

 

louise gluck

 

I lay back on the sofa reading, bare feet up enjoying the warm air, mind enjoying the verse of Louise Gluck. I bought her first book in the late 1960s, Firstborn. She was not what you'd call a Sixties poet. Pop culture was not her ambition. She received quite a lot of positive attention, a Young American Poet of the moment. I liked her concise style with language. A quarter century later I found another of her books, Ararat, which I loved. In one of the poems I read today she wrote of standing before a window speaking to her other self reflected in the glass. The poem was one part of self talking to the other part of self. Her poems are often addressed to the other known as you. Sometimes you is another person, loosely identified, and sometimes you is another part of herself, like the mirror image self. Bob Dylan uses the device of you for another person and another part of self. I've thought several Bob Dylan songs conversations with himself. Sometimes with Dylan and with Gluck, you is both other and self at once. Her poems have a presence for me, such that each one is like a painting. Each one is uniquely itself like abstractions by Robert Motherwell. The poems are intimately personal, subjective, without being confessional. I read the poems over and over, went from last line to first and through it again, each time feeling the relationship of the words with each other, seeing it new each time, sometimes slightly new and sometimes radically new. From first reading to last I am in search of the poem Louise Gluck wrote. In some ways, I'd say she'd be a very difficult poet to translate into another language. The clarity of her word usage would be sublime for a translator, but then you get into the subtle nuances and it kinda gets past word meanings.

 

robert motherwell

 

I spent two hours with maybe a dozen poems. I wasn't explicating them or trying to figure them out. I was reading them looking for their feeling, images, what she was saying. The academic way I learned to read poetry was a good education, but I don't read like that anymore. I like to read a poem as a work of art to be taken on sight like a painting on a wall in a show. I like to read it for the story it is. I like to read a poem with the same eye that I watch a movie. Gluck's stories are not ones with beginning, middle and end, nor are they dramas. They are quiet observation. Each poem is a smooth ride through her thinking process. I like the quiet her poems ease into my mind. The lines pull me through the poems not by drama, but by the progression in the poem, riding its rhythm. I feel like she has a fine feeling for rhythm. Her rhythm is walking rhythm. I even feel like her poems are brief Pinter plays. I'll put here a full poem to give an idea of how she writes a complete poem. This is not to say all her poems are shaped like this one. Some have long lines and short stanzas. The poem itself determines it's physical expression on the page.

 

          SCILLA, by Louise Gluck

 

          Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we---waves

          of sky blue like

          a critique of heaven: why

          do you treasure your voice

          when to be one thing

          is to be next to nothing?

          Why do you look up? To hear

          an echo like the voice

          of god? You are all the same to us,

          solitary, standing above us, planning

          your silly lives: you go

          where you are sent, like all things,

          where the wind plants you,

          one or another of you forever

          looking down and seeing some image

          of water, and hearing what? Waves,

          and over waves, birds singing.

 

robert motherwell

 

The buzzer on the dryer was my signal to wrap it up, fold the laundry and return home. It felt like I had just begun with Louise Gluck's poems. I could have sat with her hours more. And will. It's my book. I brought it home. Hers are internal journeys. I follow the lead of the words to see where they go, a winding trail that is never predictable. It's like driving Glade Valley Road; surprise turns left or right, the steering wheel always in motion. Attempting to drive the road too fast it becomes a struggle. Settling into it at 30 and 35 mph, it's a smooth flow going with the hills and curves. Louise Gluck's poems are a struggle to keep up with in a hurry, but slow down to the rate of flow in the poem and it becomes an easy, lilting flow something like following the dog, walking a deer trail through the woods. I come out of a round with her poems with my head feeling as clear as during a walk among the trees. It was a good cleansing today, body, mind and soul.  

 

robert motherwell

 

 

 

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