Process 2

I would make a lousy mailman. Any and everything will keep me from my appointed rounds. There are my calls to gardening, housekeeping, preparing lessons, and my own writing before sitting down to write about another poet and his or her work. Even the order of items on that list, though true, is an embarrassment.

I suspect I don't want to engage another writer so intimately. I'm afraid of exposing how little I know, how shallow my understanding can be, how easily I can be distracted. All of which says more about me than or Wallace Stevens, James Laughlin or T. S. Eliot.

Reading James Laughlin has always been enjoyable. The first part of the reading for the essay "Much Magic, Much Death" was begun long before I even imagined beginning to blog, before I worked on the Stevens' readings and essays. The first part of the essay "Much Magic, Much Death" was drafted weeks ago, before I picked up American Hybrid and a collection of Gary Snyder's work and a used volume of Adrienne Rich, several novels. . . .

Much Magic, Much Death

James Laughlin turns discursive, prose-like narrative into what Robert Hass identified as a "portrait of a desperately vulnerable yearning." He's willing to strip away the sheath and expose the nerve, as he does in "Experience of Blood," the thoughts of a man who cleans up after his son's suicide. His poems draw me in again and again because directness of language doesn't exclude depth of meaning. In contrast to the diction, his contexts range from the Greek and Roman classics to the French and Italian languages to Sanskrit tales. He read widely as evidenced in his pentastichs, five line poems, "many of them marginal jottings and paraphrases of commonplace book notations."

But he also exposes my yearnings. In "Nunc Dimittis" he captures my current fatalism about the value of my writing:
Little time now
and so much hasn't
been put down as I
should have done it.
But does it matter?
It's all been written
so well by my betters,
and what they wrote
has been my joy.
He's also too close for comfort with "Poets on Stilts." I appreciate the humor but also feel like the butt of the joke.

In Poems New and Selected, he included Book IX from "Byways," an autobiographical poem of many books divided into segments of metrical three beat lines, a form borrowed from/ discovered in Kenneth Rexroth's work. The form keeps texts lean on the page, a direct and narrow path through white space. One segment is called Trivandrum. The narrative is rangy, yet somehow slippery. The form promotes quick reading, which would not be my choice with its backdrop of a part of India I enjoyed visiting. It vacillates between being a tourist guide and a memoir, lacking emotional weight, including that sense of unease that accompanied me on my trips though Hindu texts and Indian countryside.

The poem leaves the reader with a sense of something very structured in content and form. The content begins with a brief encyclopedic description of the part of Kerala he visited: Beginning with colonial (why so late?) history, then climate, products, language, and a lengthier sketch of religious context, concentrating on Christianity. (At the time of his visit India has been independent for only six years.) He moves on to his call to India, a rumored new novel he wanted for New Directions. The author of that book becomes his host for the major events of his trip: A Kathakali production, a visit to a guru, a last sunset, the smell of southern India with its cow patties drying on roof tops during the day, burning in cook fires at night.

Is it because the language is so prosaic that I want so much more narrative and information from it? Or is it because, for example, I too watched Kathakali, sitting in a lush meadow, at dusk, the green and red of the demon's face stronger in that light? Which of the many stories did he watch enacted? I too ended up in Indian clothing, in my case because my luggage was lost in transit, the delicate patterns making me look squat. And there was an audience with a religious figure, during which I felt "a little high on wine."

The verse form, with its short lines and long stanzas, gives the memoir weight and speed without emphasis, other than in the number of lines given to any incident. That captures something of
Laughlin's immersion in a unfamiliar culture. He keeps anchoring himself with facts. This successfully holds the alien elements around him at a distance.

Process 1

Reasons for writing these essays:

1. To see if I can write a literary essay. It's a form of reaching for the stars, to try to create the type of essay that appears in the New York Times Review of Books, rangy, erudite.


2. My WriteGirl mentee is always writing essays for English class. Would my essays exhibit the same issues to be addressed that hers do. Is it even possible to write an essay in response to a literary work that says anything new?


3. To serve as evidence that I have done the reading and learned something from it.


My notes for the first essay on Stevens seemed, to quote Pollyanna in an old movie, "Scathingly brilliant." When typed up they were less than half a page long. After another week of work I think it has become overedited. And I seriously doubt that I have added anything new to a reader's understanding of Wallace Stevens. Trying to grasp his complex poems is like scratching for nits in a child's hair. There's always something else scuttling around or nesting in there that I can't reach.

Each poem is so finely worked that it resembles the paradise where the fruit never becomes overly ripe, never falls from the tree. As a gardener forever picking up moldy and bug infested
tangerines and grapefruits from the lawn, I envy that. I am suspicious of it. And I've got enough to worry about in trying to figure out the flight habits of local seagulls without also considering "ambiguous undulations" of pigeons.

Pungent Oranges

At the heart of "Sunday Morning" lies an exploration of paradise. Even in a moment of contentment, the speaker "still feels the need of some imperishable bliss." She suspects she can get closer to the divine, to the perfect moment. As a culture, we suspect we can get there only after death. But as imagined in this poem, that Paradise becomes a place of stasis, where "ripe fruit never falls." As the poem drifts, its subject dreams of walking on water to Palestine in the first stanza, unwilling to "give her bounty to the dead" in the second. Divinity's definition, even identity, differs from that of the traditional view of Christ and the sacrifice which bliss requires. The speaker is unwilling to make that sacrifice. Her bounty comprises her emotional experiences which become the measure of her soul. Bliss only exists beyond her reach. So much of that is expressed through her observations of birds who "test the reality of misty fields, by their sweet questionings. . ." and "the consummation of the swallow's wing." Birds even provide the closing image

And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, the casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Wallace Steven's language, with the exception of his lack of variety in color naming, can be decorous. "Complacencies of the peignoir" is such a mouthful that a reader might turn away from the poem "Sunday Morning." Instead it intrigues, tantalizes me into reading more. What begins as a lazy brunch retreat develops into a winding meditation that moves between the attractions of life and the possibilities of death, held together by the miracle of sound, represented in the first stanza by the exploding percussive "c" and "p" popping up around such smooth lines as "Winding across the wide water, without sound./The day is like wide water, without sound."

Stevens struggles against the constraints created by exploring this woman's world in the third person. The sections on Jove, Death as the mother of beauty, and the ring of men push into very different territory where there is talk of hinds, lutes, and much blood. He feels the pull of older mythologies and masculine rituals, embodied by Jove, a god with no mother and therefore no attachment to earth or humankind. The friction between the first speaker's world and that of the masculine speaker in other places can only be held in one poem by this division of the meditation into eight parts.

Not only does Stevens explore tensions between concepts of Paradise, the sounds of language, and points of view, he also teases at tensions between abstract language and specific image. In the process he creates a unique music, striking a balance between the complacencies and the green cockatoo. The irony here is that the oranges, coffee and cockatoo cannot drive the reflections of the sacrifice from the sunny room, but are forced into its service.

Deeply embedded structures flow as thought does, with all its diversions, digressions, and repetions. This eventual progression towards completion feels organic. The texture is so complex that it feels as though a reader could never completely comprehend it. Stevens assembled a world with an elegant air, burdened by mortality and lifted up by speculations on paradise, a world in which contentment is not enough and the paradise after death is a bore.

Assay 1: Mentors, To Ground Ourselves in History

In Annie Finch's blog entry* "Women Poets and Mentorship" there is a call to action. Lay claim to your poetic traditions. Keep the poets of the past, especially those outside of the traditional canon, alive. ". . . contemporary women poets. . . are only as strong as the foremothers and precursors and mentors we choose to claim as our own, rescue from oblivion, and to ask to reach out from the past, and bless us, and help us to begin to build, at last, a tradition."

She recommends the book Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affection, edited by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker. (It's on my purchase list.) I would also suggest: Women Writers at Work; the Paris Review Interviews, The Writer and Her Work edited by Janet Sternburg, and By Herself; Women Reclaim Poetry (among the 11 feet of biography, criticism, history of poetry, and how-to books that weren't included in the original poetry book count.)

It's my hope that the growth of M. F. A. programs and organizations for school age writers, like WriteGirl, will support our sense of being part of a chain of history. I spent my whole two years at USF on a high from contact with writers through their books and writers in the program. From being mentored, to being the mentor: WriteGirl in Los Angeles allows high school women a chance to meet with a professional writer weekly, to gather with a larger group of women and girls monthly in a genre-centered workshop, and to be published.

My mentors are among the living and the dead, women I have never met but whose works are my touchstones, and those I've worked closely with on a regular basis.

Carolyn Kizer: After an elementary school project, I continued to copy out poems I admired. As an adolescent I copied several out of Mermaids in the Basement. Some of my earliest poems were based on myths, like those in one section of this book. It was an honor to hear her read, many years later, at San Jose State University.

Norma Sullivan: Every time her office door opened it expelled a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was the 1970's and she taught Feminist Literature and Creative Writing at San Diego City College. She didn't tolerate fools and nailed me for absorbing too much research about writers and producing essays that sounded like they were written by a forty-year-old critic. She ran a literary magazine Fabulous Realities, which offered me a chance to be published and to learn editorial skills. I owe many of my educational opportunities to the state of California's post-secondary school system.

Jane Kenyon: Her poems are rooted in family and domestic detail. I too had access to those. I too could be a poet. The language is direct, the craftsmanship exquisite. There are times when her rather public struggle with disease and depression have been important to me. Her "Woman Why Are You Weeping?" swept me back to the India I too had traveled. Her translations were my first introduction to Anna Akhmatova.

Jane Hirshfield: When I interviewed with the program head at USF, I was heart-broken when I discovered that Jane Hirshfield wouldn't be teaching there. Poems, anthologies, translations, essays, I've read them all. I adopt the term "assay" from her book After.

Kim Addonizio: Kim's work was already familiar when I took a first workshop with her at Berkeley Extension. She preceded me to USF. leading the first workshop I took there. From her I absorbed the value of multiple drafts and shadowy bars.

Norma Cole, my major project advisor at USF, kept offering me mind-expanding reading. She tried to teach me to trust readers, to curb my tendency to overstate my point. She is intensely kind.

Barbara Guest: Every book is a work of fine art. Thought processes and layout are closely related. All is in motion.

Cole Swensen: From her essay "Poetry City"-- "The base structure of both the city and the poem is in the labyrinth." She affirmed for me that research can be a significant contributor to depth and complexity in a poem.

Anna Akhmatova: My fingers have worn a furrow under the lines of her "Requiem." She showed me what the responsibility of being a witness entailed.

And there are the women I have worked with in small groups: Melanie Neilson, Shelley Shipley-White, Madeline Bassinett, Jasmine Donahaye, Barbara McEnerney, Cynthia Campbell, Marti Stephen, Christina Hutchins, Alice Templeton, and Caryn Scotto D'Lucca.

Among the men who have fostered my creativity: Joseph Millar, John Fox, Aaron Shurin, John High, D. A. Powell, and David Gaynon.

*See http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/

The Joni Mitchell Express

Hass cites a winter lyric by Joni Mitchell as the starting point for his musings on Stevens' "The Snow Man." That poem calls me to slow down, to be with. It's an unexpected call to intimacy in Stevens. The lines Hass quotes from "Blue" pushes away the moment the song writer describes. It watches other people cutting, putting, singing, rushing by her. Similarly, Mitchell's Court and Spark rushes her world past you. In the midst of all that motion, you feel the Doppler Effect. It's a high speed tour through Los Angeles, as packed with specific detail as Stevens. She's "listening to the sirens and the radio" rather than existing in all
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
in the sound of a few leaves,

which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind,
That is blowing in the same bare place.

I know her Los Angeles, where "everything comes and goes" at a dead stop on the 4-0-5, "running hehind the time." She describes her world as accurately as Stevens does his. In other works, the voice of her free man in Paris is as authentic as his Sunday Morning dreamer's restless contentment. But Mitchell's world has no signs at the end stops, no rests. His poem is one sentence. Her album is one phrase. Strange how both bear the counterpoint of melancholy.

The Biography of Nothing Happened

. . . a poem is like a man walking on the bank of a river,
whose shadow is reflected in the water.

-- Wallace Stevens

The biography I owned about Wallace Stevens, a library discard, on first reading, was undistinguished. But so, it claimed, was most of his life. After all, the insurance company attorney traveled only on business and to Florida on vacation. This, in spite of the fact that over nine hundred of his letters and a number of journal excerpts have been published, a frightening wealth of source material. Samuel Morse is best when he is quoting Stevens, whose language is full of lively, specific detail. Morse' own voice, though he knew Stevens, is given to too much critical commentary and too little story.

To a poet who also has made a career outside of writing or teaching, it seems a little sad that his professional life gets so little attention. These professions create "desert places in a poet's career." But desert places, which sometimes cause the silences that Tillie Olsen explored, fascinate me. Tell me. What does an insurance attorney do? What is a day like in the office? What takes him out on the road? During those times when we stop writing, we don't stop living. It's not so easy to separate the two. Answering those questions would require a very different type of research of the biographer.

As a trained librarian, I felt a second reading of Samuel Morse's biography of Stevens was required. This is not the summer reading of a fifteen-year-old who swallowed one or two of her aunts' Harlequin novels a day. No one will give me a prize for being in a hurry. Time to realized that Death will not allow me to read everything I want. In fairness to the authors, better to slow down and absorb more completely what I read.

This longing for more narrative gives me an opportunity to confront (or circle endlessly) my discomfort with and hunger for personal detail. My husband's fascination with news about Paris Hilton astounds me. But I did once read all the way through the Gelb biography of Eugene O'Neill. I must confess, I searched for other biographies of Stevens and turned up a collection of his journal entries as a young man edited by his daughter and a two volume work by Joan Richardson. How much data am I entitled to? How much do I want? How much can I use? In this age of entitlement and freedom of information, what right to privacy do the living and dead have? There is a great deal available. So once a reader has all this additional information about a writer, what can be done with it?

Perhaps, Stevens preferred not to have his personal life examined in the light of his professional or poetic work. And vice versa. His journal entries are unlikely to begin "Researched litigation history of. . . ." or "Picked up milk and bread on the way back from work." For me, the strongest statement about the work is the work, the poem as read or heard. Poets offer readers a poem. The reader takes that artifact and gives in new life. Many of his poems require of the reader a contemplative rather than an inquiring mind.

Ironically, if the work itself is not complex and intriguing, if it cannot stand alone, what market will biographies and critical studies find? In the most recent Poets and Writers Magazine, Amy Shearn asks "Where are the badly behaved writers?" Badly behaved writers made more interesting material for many an M.F.A. and Ph.D. thesis. But the steadily working creative writing students she knows best, like Stevens, concentrate on hard work in a highly competitive world. It will be a pity if their biographers cannot.

It was in Wallace Stevens' "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" that I found an explanation for why I no longer have that hunger to own writers by knowing facts about them and why I get impatient when trying to write an essay about someone else's poetry. My most fulfilled moments as a writer and a reader occur when I am lost in the work, not analyzing it or explaining it, but becoming it. "[Truth] itself is summer and night, itself/Is the reader leaning late and reading there." Then my world, the work before me, and the writer's world exist without seams. A pause between breaths. I wonder if its possible for that to continue for longer than a moment.

Oranges, Sunshine & 31 linear feet of poetry books

I recently bought a Robert Hass book of essays, Now and Then, because I want to go back to school. About ten years ago, a friend who was auditing one of his undergraduate classes at Berkeley asked me to join her at a session. So I took an afternoon off work. With a hundred people in the lecture hall, no one noticed an interloper taking notes. The subject was Emma Lazarus. He built such a rich context around her that it made me want to read everything she'd written. Coincidentally, I soon started work on my M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of San Francisco.

A decade later, the expense of a Ph.D. program isn't something I want to tackle. The program would design much of the work I would have to do, taking me away from current projects. And the good Lord know there are enough poetry books in this house that I haven't thoroughly read, I don't need to go adding to the collection.

Originally, I thought I'd read a Hass essay, then search my library or the public library, if I didn't have any of the subject poet's work. Easy enough to read everything I could put my hands on. (A professor once called me an information sponge.) The first essay was called "Wallace Stevens and Joni Mitchell." After I began to read Stevens, the poems made two things clear. Some of them had to be read aloud, with a cup of tea in hand, preferably on the patio in the shadow of orange trees. Second, the only way to learn from the reading was to write a response to it.

At times, I actually hunger to share what I know about poets and poetry. As a volunteer with WriteGirl in Los Angeles, there's an opportunity of share some of this. But the next step in search of a larger audience seems to be an exploration into the ego-driven world of blogs. Since they don't seem to be defined as daily journals, I can share the occasional stops I make on my slow ride through Now and Then.