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.

THE ODYSSEY AND THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE, PART I

Max Beckmann: Odysseus and Calypso

Western literature has given us two great epic poems that deal with the midlife crisis or the transition to the second half of life: Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy, which includes the amazing Ulysses Canto, canto 26 of the Inferno, where Dante takes great liberties with Homer’s plot, since he has a different, non-Homeric vision of Ulysses, one shared by most readers, it turns out: the hero as a heroic explorer, a man infinitely curious about the unknown.

Odysseus has also been called the first modern man, or a Faustian Man, in the sense of insatiable quest for knowledge, even at the expense of other values – not at all the Homeric vision. However, Goethe’s FAUST starts with a midlife crisis, and ends with the Eternal Feminine.  In Western literature we also have a wonderful story of WOMAN’S journey to maturity and a reunion with her husband, Psyche and Eros, by the Roman writer Apuleius, but it’s not an epic poem; it’s a prose account, a part of a romantic novel. The ordeals that the female hero must undergo are very interesting; Psyche is in some ways very similar to Odysseus.

The word ODYSSEY has passed into the language to mean a very long journey, full of detours and trials one must pass; at the end, you return to your palace not in glory, but humbly, in a beggar’s rags. You are older and wiser; you have a different vision of what is most important in life.

Why this continued popularity of the Odyssey, while the appeal of the Iliad seems to have wanted?  Part of the answer is UNIVERSALITY. Homer has revealed some universal truths – in this case, the midlife crisis and the journey of transformation that leads to a happy later life – NOTE THAT THE HERO IS MIDDLE-AGED.  The Odyssey could be subtitled: WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO MIDDLE-AGED HEROES. This is unique because the typical literary hero dies long before the second half of life, or we don’t learn anything more about him after the heroic deed is accomplished.

1. The Collapse of Great Expectations


IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE, A CRISIS FORCES US TO INITIATE A PERSONAL ODYSSEY. In the typical case, the heroic ego project has failed, and we are reconciled at last to the idea that we won’t be rich and famous after all.  We won’t write the Great American Novel, we won’t win the Nobel Prize, we won’t become president, we won’t marry Prince or Princess Charming. Our child the genius, instead of winning a scholarship to Harvard, may be on the mental ward, diagnosed as bipolar. We do not live up to our own expectations, and our children do not live up to our expectations either. Reality is simply more modest. It’s not that we didn’t try hard enough; we did the best we could. But it also takes the right circumstances; the whole universe has to be just right if a grand achievement is to be realized. As one of my students brilliantly mis-wrote, “The limits are boundless.”

Now, American culture in particular promotes the “think big” mentality, feeding the young lies such as “You can be anything you want.” Even without this kind of cultural pressure, we know it’s normal for the young to start out with “great expectations.” What happens at midlife?  Typically, the great expectations of the first half of life collapse. This can lead to severe midlife or later-life depression. The image of Odysseus arriving home not as a hero with 12 ships loaded with treasure, but alone, in beggar’s clothes, is a haunting one.

First we have the magical thinking of childhood, then the heroic thinking of adolescence and young adulthood – which may extend until forty or beyond; finally, if we are lucky to sail through the midlife crisis without getting stranded in Lotus Land, or devoured by the Sirens, we start asking, “If I’m never going to be rich and famous, then what is the meaning of my life? What is the most important thing in life?  What should I do during the limited amount of time that remains?” 

2. A new definition of heroism

The answers that the Odyssey tries to give are nothing like “bravery in battle.” Rather, the Odyssey emphasizes the importance of a harmonious, supportive marriage; the importance of friendship; the importance of belonging to a community and one’s duty to that community. Note that these are the so-called FEMININE VALUES OF CONNECTEDNESS. The meaning of life lies in the way we touch the lives of others. In a shocking contrast to the Iliad, in the Odyssey, life is not about striving for personal glory. It’s not about who is the best warrior. It’s about trying to come home – to lead the right kind of life, the life where you really belong. 

The epic also shows the importance of maintaining focus on one’s highest goal – not losing sight of that ultimate goal. This requires persistence, patience, self-control, and trust.  Odysseus is not a superman on the battle field.  He shows courage as well as resourcefulness, but the Odyssey is not really an epic about physical courage; it’s more about not giving up hope.  As long as you have the WHY of life, you can survive almost any HOW – Nietzsche.

Revolutionary difference in Odysseus as a middle-aged hero: heroism isn’t dying in battle, but PERSISTENCE toward a goal, and survival. Heroism isn’t “look what I can do all by myself” but rather being able to ask for help, and accomplishing some important task WITH HELP. 

Achilles: two destinies. The point of the Odyssey is not that the short life with glory is to be preferred to long life without glory, but rather PERSISTENCE AND SURVIVAL – the value of life – and the value of marriage.  Both Odysseus and Penelope give us lessons in persistence.  A new concept of hero is emerging: he or she who persists.

Odyssey could be subtitled, “When Bad Things Happen to Middle-Aged Heroes.”  There is even some similarity to the Book of Job.  Odysseus starts with twelve ships, then is reduced to having one ship, then none, and finally enters his palace in beggar’s clothes.

Opening words are critically important in ancient Greek epics. Menin/andra (“rage” versus “man”)

rage – emotion of a victim, versus the intelligent self-control of the “resourceful man”


3. The theme of two destinies 

The Iliad could be said to be about two destinies:  Achilles could choose a short life with glory, or a long peaceful life without glory. Initially he praises the long and peaceful life; rage at the death of Patroclos thrusts him into battle, though he knows it will be not just his glory, but his doom.

In the Odyssey, we meet Odysseus also at a point of choice between two destinies. He’s being offered immortality – without human suffering, defeats, and whatever glory may or may not come. Perhaps the most astonishing and crucial part of the Odyssey is the fact that Odysseus chooses human life over immortality at the price of living on a lovely but boring island with Calypso (the name means the Concealer [cf “apocalypse,” or unveiling]; Calypso was the daughter of Atlas, implying a connection with the earth; she lives in a cave, suggesting the womb of mother earth.)

Even as she agrees to let him go, she once more repeats her offer. They are having a meal, Odysseus eating human food, Calypso her diet of nectar and ambrosia, when Calypso addresses Odysseus. She speaks to him with AN IMMORTAL RADIANCE UPON HER.

Wily Odysseus, if only you knew all the pain

you are destined to suffer before getting home,

you’d stay here with me and be immortal –

though you wanted her forever,

that bride for whom you pine each day.

Can I be less desirable than she is?

Less fascinating?  Less beautiful? Can mortals

compare with goddesses in grace and form?

To this Odysseus, a supreme strategist a flatterer, replies:

My Lady Goddess, here’s no cause for anger.

My quiet Penelope – how well I know –

would seem a shade before your majesty,

death and old age being unknown to you,

while she must die. Yet, it is true, each day

I long for home, long for the sight of home.

If some god has marked me out again

for shipwreck, my tough heart can endure it.

What hardship have I not suffered

at sea, and in battle!  Let the trial come.”

4. Acceptance of mortality and suffering; how best to use the rest of life

He chooses to accept mortality, persists in his goal, and accepts suffering – “let the trial come.” This is SURRENDER to reality rather than youthful denial of it.  He scorns the easy, peaceful, boring paradise and chooses the storm of human life.

HIS WILLINGNESS TO SUFFER; people not willing to suffer don’t accomplish anything (example – own business, trying to publish)

There is a shift from youthful fantasy of attaining a personal paradise (“rich and famous”) to the idea of having a task to perform, a duty, a service; from the heroic ego-project to the ideal of service.

WHAT DOES ODYSSEUS’S CHOICE TEACH US ABOUT THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE? 


We know that a goddess is not going to fall in love with us and offer us immortality.  It’s a question of ACCEPTING ONE’S MORTALITY AND DECIDING HOW BEST TO USE WHAT LIFE REMAINS.

SHIFT FROM AMBITION TO MEANINGFUL WORK; FROM THE EGO PROJECT TO SERVICE

from “look how great I am” to “what is my task in life?”

from “what can life do for me?” to “what does life demand of me?”

In the first half of life, we tend to live for the ego; the second half of life should belong to the soul.

But if I am not going to be someone spectacular, what am I here for?  To spread the light, to be part of the chorus – it is a humbling answer, it’s not what the ego wants, but it is ultimately satisfying to feel that you are a part of something greater.

The ultimate prize is A MEANINGFUL LIFE. 

Endless easy life with Calypso would be meaningless.  They were not real partners; they had nothing in common.  (Still, the elemental pleasure of existing?)

Homecoming is more important; leaving the isolation of an island paradise to become part of family and community again.

What is really important to us? Is it making as much money as possible, or having the leisure to do what we love doing?  Maybe the greatest wealth is time to do what you love – and/or human affection.  Dropping the ego, the profit motive, and “following your bliss” is often possible only later in life.

The Odyssey tells us that glory is less important than having a home; a beautiful goddess less important than a spouse who is a true partner.

5. Living for the soul

Considering the collapse of the "great expectations," the second half of life may seem uninspired and diminished. But it can be the more spiritually oriented half of life, coming home to where you really belong.  

David Whyte sees no diminishment in connecting with what might be called "soul projects" as opposed to ego projects.  I hate his stuttering short lines, but enjoy the content of this poem:

WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING

In that first

hardly noticed

moment

to which you wake,

coming back

to this life

from the other

more secret,

moveable

and frighteningly

honest

world

where everything

began,

there is a small

opening

into the new day

which closes

the moment

you begin

your plans.

What you can plan

is too small

for you to live.

What you can live

wholeheartedly

will make plans

enough

for the vitality

hidden in your sleep.

To be human

is to become visible

while carrying

what is hidden

as a gift to others.

To remember

the other world

in this world

is to live in your

true inheritance.

You are not

a troubled guest

on this earth,

you are not

an accident

amidst other accidents

you were invited

from another and greater

night

than the one

from which

you have just emerged.

Now, looking through

the slanting light

of the morning

window toward

the mountain

presence

of everything

that can be,

what urgency

calls you to your

one love?  What shape

waits in the seed

of you to grow

and spread

its branches

against a future sky?

Is it waiting

in the fertile sea?

In the trees

beyond the house?

In the life

you can imagine

for yourself?

In the open

and lovely

white page

on the waiting desk?

~ David Whyte

(The House of Belonging)

Oh how I'd love to believe this stanza -- let me commit the blasphemy of making the lines just a bit longer: 

You are not a troubled guest on this earth, 

you are not an accident 

amidst other accidents --

you were invited 

from another and greater night

than the one from which

you have just emerged.

It would be emotionally comforting to think so. But even without such a belief in having been invited, we simply have to take the responsibility for making the most of our life. Odysseus chose a rich mortality rather than an empty, boring immortality. It's been said that people who are most afraid of death are those who haven't really lived. 

LIFE IS RICHER FOR ALL WE LOSE; WARSAW POPLARS

Warsaw Poplars

It’s not the country I miss.

I miss the poplars

lining the long avenue,

leafy perspective I loved to trace

from my fourth-story window,

past Cemetery of the Russian Soldiers

all the way to the airport.

The avenue was named

after the first aviators.

uncle Gienio, killed in air battle

over france, was an aviator,

smiling from his biplane,

fading in a sepia photograph.

To his little sister, my mother, he said,

“We’ll fly around the world.”

I stood in each window,

walked out every door  –

daydreamed on all bridges, dazed

with departure’s nets of light.

I too wanted to fly around the world.

At seventeen, you don’t ask

the price. In a sepia October,

I left. Behind me swayed

Warsaw poplars,

tree by tree bowing back.

Shadows laced my hands,

the passing leaves

rustled warnings I didn’t hear –

long perspective of poplars,

upward arms burned to gold –

behind me an endless

avenue of gold wind.

~ Oriana

**

A friend commented: Life is richer for all we lose.

This reminds me of Mickiewicz’s

My fatherland, you are like health;

only he knows your worth,

who has lost you.      

(~ my translation)

Joyce saw exile as essential to being a writer. It’s in exile that we find the esthetic distance that makes us remember, understand, and appreciate details we’d otherwise find pedestrian. Only in absence, distance, sepia. That’s why most love poems are about lost love.

The majority of immigrants see their lost homeland as paradise lost – no matter how imperfect that paradise was, how bitter-sweet the memories, should the person try to be accurate (which is hardly what we want; we prefer to dwell on blissful memories). Eva Hoffman’s excellent Lost in Translation starts with the section on her childhood in Kraków, called “Paradise.”  

Does it then follow that the new country is hell? The first months, sometimes years, may have a hellish aspect, due to the immigrant’s homesickness and sense of incompetence and humiliation. There have been times when I saw America as hell, when I cried myself to sleep thinking that I made a tragic mistake. Even now, I can easily imagine my tombstone in Poland, in the town where I was born, with these words on it: Do not leave your homeland.

But eventually a more balanced view emerged: there were things I liked and things I didn’t like, as would be true of any country. No, America was neither hell nor paradise; it was Purgatory, and in Purgatory there is hope. But that’s a separate post.


**


Actually my nostalgia (I am tempted to say "nostalgias") came as a total surprise to me. I know this may sound as crazy as my delusions about America as a coast-to-coast Manhattan, but at the time of departure, I was in total denial that I'd feel any homesickness.

In fact I was determined to feel none, and I was quite a strong-willed adolescent, whether I commanded myself to read in English every day (eventually: to practice thinking in English) or do intense physical exercise. You can imagine the rest of this story, how hard the homesickness hit when it did . . .