PoetryMagazine.com
Since 1996
The Last Word: The Poet and the Poem From the Library of Congress: Poets Laureate on Public Radio, 1977-2014
by Grace
Cavalieri | February 2015, AWP
first appeared in
The Writer's Chronicle
After twenty years live-on–air, from DC’s WPFW-FM, “The Poet and the
Poem” moved to the Library of Congress in 1997; and it is still
going strong. I’d like to share some of the unforgettable remarks
our audiences heard.
In 1987, Richard Wilbur came, and when asked “what he wanted from his
poetry,” his answer was “to keep writing more poetry.” Wilbur had a
one-year service followed by Howard Nemerov’s second appointment to The
Library, from 1988 to 1990.
Nemerov: “We write a little first because it comes to us, and no doubt
when we’re long gone and out of range, people will know that it was our
autobiography but that doesn’t bother us. We hope every poem is new at a
different point in time. Shakespeare tells the same stories over and
over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice. When
I was young I got a job in advertising and lasted less than a week
because I realized that I was being asked to lie, and I thought if I
betrayed language, then language will betray me and I quit.” About
awards: “Bring ’em on. Awards have money and buy time to work on
poetry.”
Robert Pinsky had a three–year tenure, 1997-2000. A major work of Pinsky
was his translation of Dante: “The more profound aspects of the project
were working unconsciously, but consciously it was the love of
difficulty that made me do it and makes everyone do things. Everyone
loves difficulty and for most people who are experts—athletes, football
or basketball stars—even kids in video arcades—fascination is what fuels
it.”
Joseph Brodsky, 1991-1992, talked about learning English in the Soviet
labor camp by translating the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Of American poetry
he said, “It’s a remarkable poetry. A tremendous poetry. It’s a nonstop
sermon of human autonomy of individualism and self-reliance. It’s poetry
hard to escape. It has its own faults but it doesn’t suffer the
self-aggrandizement of European work where a poet regards himself as a
public figure just by writing poetry. I praise the generous spirit of
American poetry especially during the last century. It’s poetry of
responsibility for fellow human beings.”
Billy Collins, 2001–2003: “In America, the Poet Laureate can more or
less find his own ticket in the job and define the job as he goes along.
Well we don’t have a prose laureate; we don’t have a short story
laureate, or a film director laureate; it’s just poetry, so it does say
something about poetry, doesn’t it, to the centrality and the deep
significance of what poetry is to our culture.”
In 2003–2004, Louise Glück held the chair. “We are going to write what
most concerns us, what quickens the mind, and then we turn the subjects
over with as much resourceful and complex a touch as possible. I wish
poetry were not read as autobiography, although of course, it draws all
the materials of life. We have to contend with the idea of mortality; we
all, at some point, love, with the risks involved, the vulnerabilities
involved, the disappointments and great thrills of passion, so what you
use is the self
as a laboratory in which to practice, master, what seem to you
central dilemmas.”
Robert Hass, 1995–1997: “It must have been the early ’70s. One of the
things I was thinking about during the years of the civil rights
movement and the Vietnam War was the way in which our imagination of
Western politics has gone wrong; so I set myself the task of trying to
read through some of the thinkers like Hobbes who give us our ways of
thinking about government. The first thing that struck me about our
democratic capitalist ways of thinking about societies is that they
always begin in the idea of some Robinson Crusoe figure, some male
appropriating, changing property and then building up into notions of
men in competition with each other over the world’s goods which then of
course Adam Smith picked up and said, ‘Ah, but this is a magical system.
Everything turns out fine. Prices get set. People get the best goods,’
and so on. It’s an imagination.”
Prior to 1986, before Congress designated “Consultants in Poetry” to be
renamed “Poets Laureate,” Josephine Jacobsen occupied the office from
1971–1973. Speaking of her poem, “Let Each Man Remember,” she said,
“That poem has helped people directly. I’ve heard from strangers that
this poem got them through something. ‘This is something I kept on my
bed table.’ The greatest thing you can feel is that a poem really has
helped another human being in a bad time.”
William Meredith was in residence 1978–80. “I wait until the poem seems
to be addressed not to The
Occupant but toWilliam
Meredith and it doesn’t happen a lot. Poetry and experience should
have an exact ratio. Astonishingly, experience doesn’t happen very
often.”
Donald Hall came to the library in 2006–2007 and spoke about his
association with T.S. Eliot. He talked of meeting Eliot in his London
office. Eliot had visited Harvard and had invited Hall to see him when
he arrived in England. Donald Hall remembered, “Of course, I thought
this was absolutely terrifying because Eliot was the king of the
mountain in a way that no one has been king of the mountain since. I was
probably so deferential, I must’ve been disgusting.” As Hall was leaving
the visit, Eliot lingered in the doorway and said, “Let me see. Forty
years ago I was going from Harvard to Oxford. Now you are going from
Harvard to Oxford. What advice may I give you?” He waited just a second
and said, “Do you have any long underwear?”
Well we don't have a prose laureate; we don't have a short story
laureate, or a film director laureate; it's just poetry, so it does
say something about poetry, doesn't it, to the centrality and the
deep significance of what poetry is to our culture.
Ted Kooser was the Laureate in 2004–2006. Kooser explained why he wrote
poetry: “It’s an attempt to keep some very ordinary people alive.” And
of his The
Poetry Home Repair Manual, Kooser said “I believe in old fashioned
communication and if you don’t believe in that, you have no business
with this book; it’s about the things that the poet does best—working
with metaphor, fine tuning metaphor. I believe in people first, and
poetry as a means to dignify ordinary lives.”
Kay Ryan, 2008–2010, compressed thoughts within a narrow poem which she
called “the size of a pocket comb.” Ryan: “It is laughable to say that
any poetry is impersonal because the motive is terribly personal, and if
you wind up writing about a cup, there’s some personal way you are
approaching its dimension, or color, or placement of the universe. We
can’t hide ourselves. Poetry, however apparently impersonal, allows us
to hide, and if you have hidden you’ve really failed it. That means
you’ve perhaps written something that already has been written. Because
then your words would be directly behind someone else’s words and they
wouldn’t exist independently.”
Charles Simic came aboard from 2007–2008. He spoke of his relationship
with Richard Hugo, who became his friend. “I bumped into Hugo in San
Francisco in a restaurant and we were talking and Hugo said, ’What did
you do this summer?’” This was 1972. Simic answered, “Well, I went back
to Belgrade.” Hugo said, “Belgrade!” And he started describing Belgrade,
“Here’s the Danube… Here’s the main train station… Here’s the bridge…”
Simic said, “You’ve been there? You visited Belgrade?” Hugo said “No, I
used to bomb it two or three times a week.” Simic blurted out, “I was
down there.”
Mark Strand was Laureate in 1990 and 1991. “The landscape of my summers
in Nova Scotia were an important influence. I tended to mythologize
them, so I could draw on this when I need a landscape. Living in Utah,
the world of my poems now is a mountainous one, and it’s not so green or
blue, but more red and tan. There are some snowstorms in it, the likes
of which don’t appear in my earlier poems. Sometimes the landscape is
décor, not central to the poem.”
Philip Levine, 2011–2012, said, “Oh yes, I’ve changed! I remember, it
was in the ’60s. I was teaching and reading in Squaw Valley, California
in the summer. Galway Kinnell was teaching there, we team-taught, the
two of us. And, at one moment, Galway was talking, ‘I prize this Levine
poem,’ and I forget what the poem was, ‘because of its profound
tenderness.’ “And I said to myself, tenderness? Why the hell isn’t there
more tenderness in my poetry? And I realized that I needed more of that,
for one thing my anger, which featured in my first couple of books, was
diminishing, diminishing.”
Natasha Trethewey took the post in 2012, and was there until 2014. “I
think I start with the deepest truths which are for me often historical
truths. I am, of course, as you say, interested in investigating the
self, and making sense of my place in the world. And it seems to me the
only way to do it is to make sense of my place in the continuum of
history. What are those things that happened in the past that have
everything to do with this moment, and me in it? Poetry is exciting to
me because it is about discovery; and of course so is doing research.
And they naturally go together for me.”
Reed Whittemore had been a poetry consultant two times before the chair
was termed “Laureate,” 1964–65 and 1984–85. Whittemore was an authority
on the small magazine movement in America and, in fact, was partly
responsible for the first periodicals to exist—he coordinated
Association of Literary Magazines of America (ALMA), which evolved to
Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM). “The
Dial was a highly intellectual magazine in the mid-19thcentury,
and the Atlantic
Monthly, and, I guess, Harper’s,
were all sort of the same. Then along came the popular magazines, like
the SaturdayEvening
Post, and it became evident that there was such a thing as a
popular audience in America. Suddenly, democracy was raising its head,
since those magazines were commercially based, that is, they needed
capital to get started and they needed large audiences to survive. This
provoked a kind of reaction among people who were not very much
concerned with money. Pound was of course an extreme example. So you
have a funny conflict going on here between the new world of big
magazines and this subculture.”
Poetry, however apparently impersonal, allows us to hide, and if you
have hidden you've really failed it.
Stanley Kunitz’s second Library term was 2000 to 2001; he spoke as
historian and poet. “In the very early part in the century we were still
writing in the manner of the poets of the century before, inheriting the
poets of the so-called Golden Age and a very elite group of people,
highly educated, representing the wealthy and powerful of the nation.
Poets as opposed to Walt Whitman who, for the first time, realized that
we lacked as a country a great myth of our creation, the creation of the
democratic spirit; and this is what makes him such a significant figure.
And we’ve had to contend with another voice that comes out of the
puritanical sensibility of the early settlers, their inheritance of a
moralistic approach to human experience and there’s been a problem in
this country of how to accept an art that is so free in spirit and so
articulate about the wrongs of not only humanity but society.”
W.S. Merwin, 2010–2011, arrived with a strong purpose—poetry
translation. Merwin said, “Everyone is quite happy to remind us the
translation of poetry is impossible. It’s not because it’s possible that
we do it; but is because we have to do it—it’s a necessity. Actually
speech is impossible if you go by the laws of mathematics. I could say
‘thank you’ it doesn’t mean anything but is the only way we can say
thank you, and so we try to do that with words. I think poetry began
when language began for that same reason. I think poetry is about
expressing what cannot be expressed. Translation is just as essential
and just as possible.”
Rita Dove, 1993–1995, on her book Thomas
and Beulah: “First, and most difficult, was a moral issue. How can
I presume to write about my grandparents’ lives, to take on the voices
and say this is what they would have said if they had the opportunity?
What helped was when I asked my mother for some details from childhood,
and she never asked to see a single poem. I gained confidence from my
mother’s trust that I would not do anything to embarrass the family.
There were other challenges—for instance to decide how much was going to
be strictly autobiographical. At what point do I begin to invent? My
grandmother’s name was not Beulah but Georgianna, and that was one
aesthetic decision I had to make. Georgianna is a wonderful name but it
was too male-based for the book, and the second name has biblical
connections that were wanted for the book. Also the very long name is a
difficult thing to fit on a line, to be practical, so once I knew I
didn’t have to be absolutely faithful to biographical truth I could go
after an inner truth. That freed me.”
The series wishes to acknowledge the Library of Congress, the Witter
Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Reva and David Logan Foundation for
support, plus NPR distribution, and The Pacifica Network.
____
Grace Cavalieri currently
celebrates thirty-seven years on-air as founder/producer of “The Poet
and the Poem.” The series is recorded at The Library of Congress for
public radio. She’s the author of sixteen books of poems and twenty-six
produced plays. Cavalieri holds AWP’s 2013 George Garrett Award, and she
is the monthly poetry columnist/reviewer for The Washington
Independent Review of Books.
|