ANGIE VORHIES ON HOAGLAND AND HIRSCH

[photo: Angie Vorhies]

I’ve always liked Hoagland and look forward to reading new work from him whenever it appears, but I don’t LOVE him the way I do Hirsch. 

Of course, I see similarities between the two. Both are storytellers who use plain speech and an (often self-deprecating) “I” persona. Both are authoritative narrators and their poems often end looking down from a higher perspective (the rhetorical distance Campion pointed out).  But I think you and he are right about the music—the interplay between the limitless (music, imagery) and structure. I think it’s why I often have trouble with surrealist and language poets. I love those elements in a poem—Hirsch’s “Polish Home for the Aged” has those surreal images of the brother as a mule and cousin Irka as a “poorly planted tree/Wrapping itself in a dress of white blossoms.” But what makes those sensory images so powerful is that they are locked in the memory of an elderly person staring at four blank walls and a bare ceiling.  The context and loss are heartbreaking. 

However, Hirsch, too, is occasionally guilty of the tidy summation.  I liked the playful tone of “Self Portrait” and its comparisons of internal struggle to “a married couple who can’t get along,” a two-party system, Adam and Eve.  But the poem falls flat for me in the last few lines:

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I’ll be reconciled at last,
I’ll be whole again.

This strikes me as an obvious, lazy, “concluding sentence.”  (Unless his point was to slam the poem shut like a coffin and kill it, in which case, he certainly achieved that goal.)

I once read an interview with Hoagland where he was asked if he considered himself a cat poet or an ox poet.  He replied: “I’m an ox poet who wishes he were a cat poet.” https://www.pshares.org/issues/article-detail.cfm?intArticleID=9181. 

I think of him more as a monkey poet, i.e., the trickster or Court Jester, who is there to humble us and point out our follies.  Hoagland as performer, always going for the laugh or shock value in order to tear away our illusions.  He has said that he wants to write unsentimental poetry, tough enough to be in the real world. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/6897698.html

Hirsch, on the other hand, while readily and frequently acknowledging his own (and our) human weaknesses, tends toward the lyrical, lifting his voice up to sing in praise.   Personally, I can take a joke, but on the whole, I prefer being serenaded to being slapped around. 

Hoagland’s “Muchness” (Best American Poetry 2008) starts off as a fairly straightforward descriptive love poem, but then it’s as if Hoagland can’t stand the idea of playing it straight, so he has to step back and remind us who’s in charge here, telling us what’s going on from a safe, ironic distance.

Muchness



I saw you in the rainy morning
from the window of the hotel room,
running down the gangplank to board the boat.


You were wearing your famous orange pants,
which are really apricot
and the boat rocked a little
as you stepped to its edge.


You were going to work
with your backpack and sketchbook
and your bushy gray hair
which bursts out in weather
like a steel wool bouquet.


That’s how my heart is, I thought –
It lies coiled up inside of me, asleep,
then it springs out and shocks me
with all of its muchness.


But as I was dreaming, your boat pulled away.
Then there was just the gray sheen
of the harbor left behind, like unpolished steel
and the steep green woods that grow down to the shore,
and the gauze of mist on the hills.


It was your vanished boat
which gave the scene a shape,
with its suggestion of journey and destruction.


And the narrative then, having done its work,
it vanished too,
leaving its affectionate cousin description behind;


– Description,
which lingers,
and loves for no reason.


--Tony Hoagland

**

It almost reminds me of a teenage boy who’s embarrassed to admit he loves his mother and so has to crack a joke about it.   Too bad, because I think he’s right—description does linger and that’s why we love it. 

***

Oriana:


I love this stanza:


That’s how my heart is, I thought –
It lies coiled up inside of me, asleep,
then it springs out and shocks me
with all of its muchness.


I think a poet such as Hirsch, who seems at ease with feelings, would have continued more along those lines, without the turn to cleverness. Merwin would have gone for timeless wisdom: from what we cannot hold stars are made ("Youth," in In the Shadow of Sirius).

Here the "clever" kind of ending (indeed much of the poem) is almost Billy Collins, especially the penultimate stanza. But the last statement has more feeling than Collins usually expresses. Because Tony's humor is not relentlessly predictable, and because he is not afraid to play it straight whenever he chooses to, he can go much into places that would be a problem for Collins, who can go only so far, given his method of turning everything into a joke.

I loved the perceptive Ploughshares piece by Jennifer Grotz. Let me quote the part about cat poets and ox poets:

I was telling Tony about something I’d read that morning that referred to the distinction Zbigniew Herbert once made between “cat poets,” those who sit indolently and curl their tails and wait for a poem to come to them, and “ox poets,” those who produce poems more prolifically from working every day in the field, as it were. Tony drily replied, “I’m an ox poet who wishes he were a cat poet.”

What’s “ox-like” in Hoagland’s poetry? One answer is that it’s what’s “American” about his poems. They don’t seem to come from anything resembling aristocratic entitlement but rather from a dogged autodidacticism, a kind of voracious but simultaneously pragmatic consideration of poetry and how to write it. Like Eliot’s famous injunction, Hoagland’s poetry--and essays--show signs of having “inherited a tradition by great labor.” 


Delightfully, Hoagland is the first to admit this. After winning the Zacharis Award from Ploughshares in 1994 for his first book of poetry, Sweet Ruin, Hoagland spoke of his early work as being “incredibly untalented.” “It took a long, long time for me just to get competent. When you’re a student of poetry, you’re lucky if you don’t realize how untalented and ignorant you are until you get a little better. Otherwise you would just stop.” If Hoagland associated native poetic genius with being a “cat poet,” his own poems do, nevertheless, reveal cat-like attention, lithe, sometimes nearly gymnastic syntactical ability, as well as the savoring of sensual pleasure.


Although Zbigniew Herbert’s distinction had primarily to do with the manner and rapidity with which poems come, Hoagland extends the analogy: “The ‘cat’ poet is an aristocrat of sensibility; the ox poet, which I am, is the one who tells what the yoke feels like or why it is a representative experience to fail--at love, at understanding, at compassion, at community, at being exceptional, or more generally, at being a human being--and these testimonies seem an important poetic tradition. Think of John Clare’s “I Am” or William Blake’s “London”; the cat sings the aria, the ox sings the blues.”


https://www.pshares.org/issues/article-detail.cfm?intArticleID=9181

And speaking of synchronicities, I was just going over my own Herbert translations. But I mustn't start talking about Herbert, or this post will never achieve closure.


Here, for reference, is Hirsch's poem mentioned by Angie Vorhies:

IN A POLISH HOME FOR THE AGED

(CHICAGO 1983)

It’s sweet to lie awake in the early morning

Remembering the sound of five huge bells

Ringing in the village at dawn, the iron

Notes turning to music in the pink clouds.

It’s nice to remember the flavor of groats

Mixed with horse’s blood, the sour tang

Of unripe peppers, the smell of garlic

Growing in Aunt Stefania’s garden.

I can remember my grandmother’s odd claim

That her younger brother was a mule

Pulling an ox cart across a lapsed meadow

In the first thin light of a summer morning;

Her cousin, Irka, was a poorly planted tree

Wrapping itself in a dress of white blossoms.

I could imagine an ox cart covered with flowers,

The sound of laughter coming from deep branches.

Some nights I dream that I’m a child again

Flying through the barnyard at six a.m.:

My mother milks the cows in the warm barn

And thinks about her father, who died long ago,

And daydreams about my future in a large city.

I want to throw my arms around her neck

And touch the sweating blue pails of milk

And talk about my childish nightmares.

God, you’ve got to see us to know how happy

We were then, two dark caresses of sunlight.

Now I wake up to the same four walls staring

At me blankly, and the same bare ceiling.

The morning starts over in the home:

Someone coughs in the hall, someone calls out

An unfamiliar name, a name I don’t remember,

Someone slams a car door in the distance.

I touch my feet to the cold tile floor

And listen to my neighbor stirring in his room,

And think about my mother’s peculiar words

After my grandmother died during the war:

“One day the light will be as thick as a pail

Of fresh milk, but the pail will seem heavy.

You won’t know if you can lift it anymore,

But lift it anyway. Drink the day slowly.”

            ~ Edward Hirsch, from Wild Gratitude


**


Una:


Thoughtful essay by Angie Vorhies. I love the photo as I am a beach-walker. And speaking of cats this makes me feel like a cat might with a warm bowl of dream. (Typo: I meant "cream.") Toying with words today.

POETRY NEEDS A NARRATIVE THREAD

[image: Miriam Brysk, "In Bloom"]

Rick Bursky teaches a poetry workshop at UCLA extension. Here is some of what he's collected for his students.

**

You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. Forget inspiration. Being a writer/poet is a decision. You decide, then you do the work. ~ Rick Bursky

Fiction is the art of the story, poetry is the art of language.

“Narrative is like an almond in a chocolate bar, nice but not necessary.”

~ Charles Wright.

If not narrative, what? Imagery ~ Rick Bursky

“Poetic language … can be defined first as language in which the sound of the words is raised to an importance equal to that of their meaning, and also equal to the importance of grammar and syntax.” ~ Kenneth Koch

“The novel relates; the poem tries to leave as much unsaid as possible.” ~ Charles Simic

“There’s no preparation for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume of poetry or a book of philosophy in one’s pocket would serve as well as any university.” ~ Charles Simic

BERRYMAN

I will tell you what he told me

in the years just after the war

as we then called

the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said

you can do that when you're older

lose it too soon and you may

merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested

changing the usual order

of the same words in a line of verse

why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse

get down on my knees and pray

right there in the corner and he

said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard

and the drink but he was deep

in tides of his own through which he sailed

chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for

much older than I was he was in his thirties

he snapped down his nose with an accent

I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me

to paper my wall with rejection slips

his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled

with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence

that permitted everything and transmuted it

in poetry was passion

passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

~ W.S. Merwin

***

Is becoming a poet a conscious decision? Has this been anyone's experience? I tend to agree with Cecilia Woloch: We don't choose whether or not we write, and we don't choose what we write about.

I think our central themes, our obsessions, are not a matter of choice. No matter what the workshop prompt, I soon find myself writing about one or more of my central themes. There seems to be no escape.

But we can decide to become better poets. To accomplish this, we need to read more poetry -- and to re-read and re-read those poets who delight us most. Don't worry about a conscious acquisition of craft. When you read slowly and in depth, going over the text many times, you acquire a model, a matrix that will later serve your own writing.

If you've attended my Magee workshop at the Carlsbad Library, you already know that I strongly disagree with the anti-narrative school of poetry. The statement by Charles Wright, however, was enlightening in a different way: I finally understand why his work, beyond the first volume, is so boring. His skill with imagery is wonderful, but without a narrative thread, however slight, the image just don't stay in the reader's mind.

Imagery is limitless: it can go on and on. An imagery-based poem can start anywhere and end anywhere -- without at least some ghost of a story, it doesn't matter. Story, like structure, is a limiting factor. Limiting factors help us grasp meaning.

True, a story in a poem is (or should be) different from a story as told in fiction. Generally, in a poem you go for a NARROW SLICE, a close-up, a single small incident. Don't enumerate everything that happened at Uncle Tony's funeral; choose one memorable moment, then go in depth.

I agree about the importance of the unsaid, though I am not sure that the line between poetry and fiction is quite so firm. A good prose writer also leaves quite a bit unsaid.

What Simic says about grave digging sounds very cute, but it evades the issue of the poet's need for a rich mentality. To have a rich mentality, you generally need both reading and interesting experiences. Still, there is no predicting which experience will haunt you enough to make you write a poem. But that's the adventure of poetry. That's why writing poetry is more of a high than writing prose: it's unpredictable, a gift. As Lynn Luria said to me, "When you write a poem, you rise to the ceiling. When you write a short story, you can also rise to the ceiling, but holding all the furniture."

I invite your feedback.

Carine:

Each time I read a rule or axiom regarding poetry, I say yes, that's it, that's the truth. Then I stumble upon a quote, or another poet's thought, and it is the polar opposite. Not a contradiction. Just a different p.o.v. I say, now that's what I mean, that's the truth. In poetry, we make up rules and we break them. We make statements of profundity and believe them. Then something else rears its head and that too is true. I guess what I'm saying is, that poetry is forever in motion, making itself up time and time again, variations on so many themes.

I do love the "narrative braiding" of B.H. Fairchild. That's his term for what he accomplishes with his stories: the weaving of narrative and lyric. How the two may begin separately and join up down the course of the poem, then making a fabric of story and sound. Dorianne Laux does this as well; Ellen Bass; Linda Pastan; Gerald Stern. I love the idea of the braiding, and I agree with you, Oriana, that a poem should have a narrative thread. But then again, I've written and read poems which have mood, and music, and provoke strong emotion without the backstory. See? I contradict myself. That's poetry!

Oriana: 
Yes, it seems that everything we say about poetry resembles what we say about other huge realms (love, life, America) -- it's both true and false.

I use the term "interweave" rather than "braiding," but I think Fairchild and I mean the same thing. The word TEXT is related to TEXTILE. It means "something woven." You need the warp and the woof. You can't have a satisfying poem that's composed only of the limitless elements (music, imagery, imagination in the sense of a mental realm), or only of the limiting elements (story and structure -- such a poem would be prosy and pedestrian). Poetry is "something woven" from the limiting and limitless elements.

Poems without some narrative, however slight, do not appeal to me -- I can't think of an exception. Poems with too few verbs in them are usually static, lacking movement, much less that kind of velocity that makes a poem seem inevitable, flowing by itself.

This goes against the current trend toward clever, emotionally aloof, meaningless poems, poems that appear to throw unusual images together for no special reason, in no particular order. There may be momentary pleasure in reading such work, a brilliant phrase here and there. But there is no emotional power. Even the occasional brilliant phrase will be forgotten because the brain seeks pattern, seeks meaning.

A bit of narrative goes a long way toward being that thread of meaning on which to slip the beads of relevant images. The irrelevant ones drop away. Instead of a confusing complexity, we have a marvelous simplicity. In great art, we can even speak of a radical simplicity. That kind of simplicity contains an infinities.

But I hasten to add that there are wonderful poems where a non-narrative element is dominant. Hirsch's early poems show a dominance of imagery and music, mood and mystery. And yet these are hardly poems in which nothing happens. There is coherence and closure. Still, must admit it's the imagery and music that hypnotize me into a kind of trance by which I recognize true poetry.

Nevertheless, I think his best book is Lay Back the Darkness. That volume has luminous clarity, in contrast to the dark, clotted density that tends to plague poems built primarily on imagery. The imagery is still rich -- Hirsch is obviously a master of the lyrical image. But the imagery is wonderfully integrated with the narrative. The poems are transparent, and yet they still have that hypnotic effect on me. 

Lenny:

Charles Wright's statement explains a lot about his poetry. I've loved his language (the images and sounds) but couldn't understand the poems.

Oriana:

"No trace of a story line" is a line from "The Southern Cross." A trace can be found here and there, but not enough to stay in memory. This is the problem that came with assuming that poetry consisted of imagery. No matter how exquisite the images, you have to slip them onto a narrative thread and discernible structure.

Una:

I especially like the concept of the "unsaid." As you know people always ask for more in my work, but I say fill in the spaces as the reader chooses. And I agree with "why point out a thing twice." Reminds me of Basho --"why tell everything" -- I like white space in paintings and consider what's left out in poetry as our white space. There is great importance to the unsaid.

Passion is what makes poetry. No matter how well crafted a poem is, if it lacks passion it's lifeless on the page. Needs mouth to mouth and even then cannot be resuscitated. I especially like it when someone says my poetry has "heart" by that I hope they mean passion. Got an email this morning – someone said my poem "Matthew" haunts them.

You know how I feel about imagery, that's what I look for in poetry as much as language. Following the imagery is the adventure of poetry at least for me as the writer.

And how right you are about "there is no escape" from our central themes, they pursue us all of our lives and whatever a prompt is and I usually use my own I still revert to my original obsessions.

**

Oriana:

Imagery is definitely not enough for me. I have to have a bit of narrative on which the imagery is draped. So many poems have good imagery but such scant and/or uninteresting narrative that pretty soon I don't remember anything about the poem. Compared to poems that I remember forever, the purely "imagistic" poems haven't created enough meaning; they haven't delivered enough discovery and surprise.