textBOX
Our Current Issue
TMR’s Audio Contest
Poem of the Week
Author Archives: Jason Koo
Introducing Poem of the Week
Beginning tomorrow, The Missouri Review will feature a weekly poem online. Each poem will be selected from a previous issue or from submissions by new contributors. Poetry submissions to the magazine will now be considered both for the print journal and the website. Once posted, the Poem of the Week will remain on the main page for a week; it will then be stored in an archive.
News from Past Contributors
Davis McCombs, whose “Tobacco Mosaic” sequence won our Larry Levis Prize in 2004 (The Missouri Review, Vol. 28, No. 1), has won the 2005 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize of $10,000 for his second book, Dismal Rock, selected by Linda Gregerson. “Tobacco Mosaic” comprises a major part of his new book.
David Roderick, whose “The Good Newes from Plimoth” sequence was published in The Missouri Review, Vol. 22, No. 3, has won the 2006 APR/Honickman Prize for his first collection, Blue Colonial, selected by Robert Pinsky. The collection includes “The Good Newes from Plimoth,” and will be published in September.
Congratulations to both poets!
Meeting New Poets at AWP
I had a great time at AWP this year. Usually AWP makes me feel as if I’ve stumbled into purgatory, but this year I met some people who really touched me. Derek Mong, our young contest winner, came up and introduced himself at our table, and I discovered that he grew up in my hometown of Cleveland. Ah, a fellow sufferer, I thought, I wonder if he likes the Indians? I also found out Derek was applying for a job at my high school–where his contact was my former advisor and freshman English teacher, Bill O’Neil. This took me way back. Roy Jacobstein stopped by the table several times to see me while I wasn’t there, prompting my co-workers to say, “Jason, this crazy guy keeps coming by the table to see you–he says we’re going to publish him.” I said, “We are going to publish him, a little respect, people!” Roy finally came by while I was there, and sat down right next to me, promoting the magazine. He gave me a copy of his new chapbook, Tourniquet, featuring a truly terrific long poem about his experience as a contestant on Jeopardy, and chatted excitedly about his forthcoming collection, A Form of Optimism. Jason Bredle, one of my favorite poets, stopped by to “meet” me–we’d met a long time ago in Houston, through Marc McKee (our poet liaison), but at the time didn’t have much to say to each other except “Hey” and “Kenneth Koch.” We talked about the Koch tribute panel we’d seen the previous day, and then Neil Shepard of Green Mountains Review stopped by to say hello. Jason said, “Hey, you’ve published me in your journal,” at which point he started having problems with his left eye. He rubbed it for a while then suddenly stooped over. His contact popped out. I saw it sticking to the fingernail of his left index finger. For some reason this was a very powerful image for me. Neil, perhaps freaked out by all the sudden contact lens drama, departed. Jason turned to me and said, “Well, I guess I screwed that up.”
I met David Hernandez in the hotel bar with his wife Lisa Glatt. They were drinking red cocktails in martini glasses which they stressed were not cosmopolitans. David published some great poems in TMR last year, and has just published his second full-length collection, Always Danger. He is a very funny guy. He asked me, “Do you have any tragic stories you can tell in under a minute?” I said, “No, all mine are epics. What about you?” He said, “Yeah, this one time I got a hickey on my forehead.” I said, “How did that happen?” He said, “I stuck a Nerf basketball hoop to my forehead and tried to make baskets.”
Rebecca Black I met at the Horseshoe Lounge, a typical Steve Gerhke haunt. Rebecca published her first book, Cottonlandia, last year with University of Massachusetts press. Over the next few nights I kept running into her and having more drinks, which is perhaps the only way writers really ever get to know each other. Rebecca told me that when she lived in Paris she used to go for swims in the afternoon then return to her apartment to write–and eat gummi bears. I found this incredibly endearing; I have a soft spot for gummi bears. Later she accused me of being “really sarcastic” (which was true) and asking her “Elimidate questions” (also true).
I truly enjoyed meeting all of these poets, and many others I don’t have space to mention. Hopefully next year in Atlanta will be just as fun.
Two New Books by Schuyler and Levis
American poets James Schuyler and Larry Levis were both overlooked and underrated throughout their careers, and, while appreciation for their work has grown since their deaths in the 90′s, their names are still largely unknown to the general reading public. Hopefully, the release of two books will help to correct this situation and bring proper attention to their work. Turtle Point Press is set to release Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-1991 this month, a Schuyler-lover’s dream, since the virtues of his poetry are those of a good letter: wit, charm, friendliness, attentiveness, care. Eastern Washington University Press has released A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larrry Levis, a compendium of essays, reviews, interviews, and reminiscences by more than forty American poets affected by Levis’s life and work, along with twelve previously uncollected essays by Levis himself. Levis, like Keats and Crane, inspires absolute devotion in his readers, so this book should come as something of a godsend to those who have been hungering for anything by or simply about Levis since his too early death in 1996.
For more information on Schuyler’s letters, read Michael Dirda’s review for the Washington Post. For more information on A Condition of the Spirit, go to the Eastern Washington University Press website.
Czeslaw Milosz and his Age
It is still hard for me to believe that Milosz is dead. I know he was 93, but his age, so far from being an indication that he would die soon, seemed rather proof of his invincibility. No poets, I thought, lived into their nineties—and if they did, they certainly weren’t productive. One could be worried about a poet when he was in his seventies or eighties, but once he’d crossed the truly awesome threshold into his nineties…well, then he was untouchable. It seemed to me that Milosz, after having lived through nearly the entire twentieth-century, had received a special exemption from death: if you can live through that, said Death, well, I guess I can let you write until you’re ready to go.
And write Milosz did. The poems he was writing at the end of his life are as strong as any in his immense body of work. I remember seeing a fresh batch of his poems in a 2001 issue of American Poetry Review (later published in his New and Collected Poems 1931-2001) and being astonished at their incredible directness; the thought seemed to be entirely unmediated by the language. It was as if Milosz were thinking his poems directly onto the page:
Texas
I came back from Texas.
I had been reading my poems there.
Nowhere else than in America do they pay so well for reading poems.
Next to my signature I put the date 2000.
Old age clings to my feet like dense pitch.
The mind resists, but that signifies consciousness.
And what can I do with it, unveil it to whom?
The best strategy is to say nothing.
I have experienced the shame of the recollected illusion
of loving, hating, aspiring, striving.
And now I can hardly believe
that I managed to live through my life.
The fact that these were poems in translation made their “directness” even more astonishing. I felt I was witnessing a genuine literary event: a new level of mastery achieved by an already acknowledged master entering his nineties.
Milosz redefined what one can do with a poetic career. Even the greatest examples of longevity and evolution in the canon—Yeats, Neruda, Auden—seem somehow less mighty when placed next to Milosz. He won the Nobel Prize in 1980, when he was just under 70 years old; the awarding of this prize usually marks the culmination of a poet’s career, and the turn into the seventies (I tremble as I write this) usually marks a decline in poetic output, if not in quality. Think of Seamus Heaney: how much work has he produced since winning the Nobel Prize? Yes, he gave us a new translation of Beowulf (and for this, all students of English literature are eternally grateful), but Electric Light (2001) seems slight for a poet of Heaney’s standards, and when placed next to the mammoth collections Milosz was producing in the decade after winning the Nobel Prize—Unattainable Earth (1986), Provinces (1991), and even The Collected Poems (1987) which contained a substantial body of new work—it seems even smaller. Heaney’s publications have been primarily retrospective since his Nobel: Opened Ground, a volume of selected poems in 1998, and Finders Keepers, a volume of selected prose in 2002. I don’t mean to come down so hard on Heaney, whose work I greatly admire, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that he is lazy, or resting on his laurels; I simply want to point out, through a contrast with Heaney’s post-laureate work, the truly staggering nature of Milosz’s late achievement.
Heaney himself has particular reverence for Milosz, and my sense is that for him, Milosz represents a kind of personal taskmaster. What other models does a relatively young Nobel laureate have (Heaney won the prize in his mid-fifties) for continuing poetic achievement into old age?
Much of Milosz’s stature has to do with age—both his physical age at the time of death and “the age” he lived in and came more fully than any other poet to represent. Heaney points out in a glowing essay on Milosz that he “is our secular poet not only because he is almost coeval with the saeculum itself but because the term ‘the century’ keeps recurring all through his work. Decade by decade, the story of his life and the story of his times keep in step.” Milosz’s bio is the stuff of legend; indeed, the term “bio” seems grossly inadequate when it comes to this poet. His is the bio of the twentieth-century. In Heaney’s summation:
“In the twenties, he was a student in Vilnius and Paris. In the thirties, a member of the literary avant-garde in Poland. In the forties, involved with the Polish Resistance, a witness to the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi defeat of the uprising, then attached to the embassy of the People’s Republic in Washington. In the fifties, a defector from that regime, an intellectual in exile in France—his equivalent of forty days in the desert. In the sixties, a professor of Slavic languages at the University of California at Berkeley, in the full summer of his poetic powers, a Solomon among the flower-children. In the seventies, still in full creative spate, his status changing from émigré writer to world visionary. In the eighties, the Nobel Prize winner, a moral and political force in the Poland of Solidarity. In the nineties, a marvel of continuing imaginative vitality, a voice somewhere between the Orphic and the Tiresian.”
In virtually every line of Milosz there is a sense of the vastness of this life behind it. Only Milosz could have written the lines “What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?” and been taken seriously. But Milosz’s power as a poet does not derive simply from the power of witness; it starts further back in the man, behind the experience. There is a life-force, a great drive to the consciousness, which gives this poetry its power. “I desire everything,” Milosz says in a recent poem. “Changed into pure seeing, I will absorb, as before, the proportions of human bodies, the color of irises, a Paris street in June at dawn, all of it incomprehensible, incomprehensible the multitude of visible things.” From the start Milosz has been on a quest “to capture as much as possible of tangible reality,” as he says in the introduction to his New and Collected Poems; this, for him, “is the health of poetry.”
One wants to speak only in very broad terms about Milosz; talking about specific lines or images in his poetry seems silly. It may well be that he will come to be regarded as the poet of the twentieth-century. What the world lost in Milosz was an absolute eminence, a figure who provided us with a moral and aesthetic center. Whom will we turn to now in the face of atrocity?
* * *
Thankfully Milosz was able to live out his final years in Krakow, no longer an exile, at home among a people he helped save. I saw him there last summer, as part of a group from the University of Houston participating in the second annual Krakow Poetry Seminar. He was constantly beaming, though hard of hearing and barely able to hold a pen to sign autographs; he seemed to be enjoying his much-deserved attention as master poet of the city. There were two main readings organized for the distinguished faculty of the seminar (which included Seamus Heaney, Adam Zagajewski, Edward Hirsch, W.S. Merwin, Linda Gregerson and Eavan Boland): the first at Bernardynow Church, the second at the Tempel Synagogue in the Kazimierz. Milosz closed the first reading, at the end of which he received a standing ovation. I was struck by the sight of Polish teenagers coming to the front of the audience to snap pictures and catch him on video—I can’t imagine that ever happening in America. During the second reading, Milosz arrived late, walking on stage during the Polish translation of a Linda Gregerson poem. For half a minute everyone (except perhaps for Linda Gregerson) forgot about the poem and turned their attention to Milosz. I watched as Heaney and Zagajewski broke into unrestrained smiles of joy.
Devotion in the Age of Larry Levis
For the past few months I’ve been reading A Condition of the Spirit: the Life and Work of Larry Levis, a compendium of essays, reviews, reminiscences and critical articles written both by and about Larry Levis. It is an incredible book, simply for the devotion it shows to this poet whom most Americans have never even heard of. It is extremely rare for a book like this to come out only eight years after a poet’s death; no such book came out, to my knowledge, after the deaths of Eliot, Frost, Stevens or Crane. The devotion Levis inspires in his readers is important—it is on the level of that inspired by a Keats or a Rilke. And I think devotion itself is an important criteria for evaluating a writer: how much devotion does he inspire in you? Do you want to read everything he has written? Do you get completely absorbed in reading anything by or about him?
Devotion seems to be inspired by a particular kind of moral intelligence and openness, a humor, honesty, and wisdom. I do not think I am truly “devoted” to Rilke (even though it sounds like sacrilege to say this) in the same way I am devoted to Levis or Keats because Rilke lacks their sense of humor and generosity. Perhaps, too, devotion is inspired by the sense of a quest, the sense that an artist is giving his life completely to an ideal, constantly evolving, constantly coming into his own. So I am devoted to the Ashbery of the 60′s, 70′s, and 80′s, but not the Ashbery of the late 90′s and early 21st century, because that Ashbery has lost his sense of the quest. You just don’t get the sense that Ashbery cares much anymore.
Who else inspires devotion? Proust, Kafka, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Mozart, Flaubert, Andy Goldsworthy, Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Emerson, Auden, Hart Crane, Chekhov, Cervantes…start your own lists.
I think it is interesting to think of Ashbery and Levis side by side. Harold Bloom has proclaimed the second half of the twentieth-century “The Age of Ashbery,” but an equally compelling case could be made for Levis. Certainly by Winter Stars in 1985 Levis had overtaken Ashbery as the most important poet in America; and while he published far fewer volumes than Ashbery, he showed a much more dramatic evolution, and a greater sense of craft and care. I would say the 60′s and 70′s were “The Age of Ashbery,” and the 80′s and 90′s were “The Age of Levis.” I would also say that Levis is going to prove to be the more influential poet.
Wonderfully, Ashbery and Levis evince almost no awareness of each other throughout their careers. They calmly go about their business, writing the boldest and most original poems of the era, as if living in completely different lands. The “school” of Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Snodgrass, Levine, and others that Levis went through, Ashbery ignored. And Levis, in his criticism and interviews (which are terrific), doesn’t seem at all interested in the “New York School” of Ashbery, Schuyler, Koch and O’Hara, nor Ashbery’s important French influences, Pierre Reverdy and Raymond Roussell. Levis definitely seems to be the more “professional” poet; he was groomed in the academy (getting an M.F.A. and Ph.D.) and took his teaching responsibilities very seriously. Ashbery only dabbled in teaching, made most of his bread through art criticism. The American poetry scene is very strange; admirers of Levis never talk about him in relation, or comparison, to Ashbery, and vice versa. I am not sure Harold Bloom has even read Larry Levis, and that idea (not reading him) seems preposterous to me. How can you talk about Ashbery as being the greatest and most influential poet of the age without even considering Larry Levis? Levis’s work in the 90′s makes Ashbery’s work of the same period seem trite.
Levis is the only American poet thus far who has used the influence of Eastern European poetry in a productive way—not losing his Americanness, and not simply bemoaning the tragedy of European suffering, but deepening his work with an authentic philosophical-historical consciousness, a la Milosz or Herbert.
I leave you with some quotes from Levis’s interviews, as reprinted in A Condition of the Spirit:
“Most poets in this country can expect little but to be neglected and unread, and they are lucky if they can turn this to their advantage, most of them are too much like the culture that has produced them; they cannot stand to be ignored. All poets are spoiled, but if you can’t stand neglect you are spoiled in the wrong way.”
“Actual politics often seems like an adolescent who insists upon Either/Or, upon answer, classification, completion. It is all Keats did not mean by negative capability. Poetry is an ancient art that insists upon Both/Neither. Politics can’t understand this.”
“It may seem strange but I believe that poems are written because the poet engages in a special form of forgetting and therefore is enabled to concentrate upon the composing of a poem; that is, the poet deliberately, skillfully, insouciantly, cunningly, faithfully, unforgivably forgets. It is the only kind of forgetting which is also a form of remembering, yet it does no good to reflect upon the greatness of Wordsworth in such moments, and, from a certain perspective at least, the poet in those moments simply doesn’t give a shit.”