Author Archives: Tim Hayes

Self Portrait

Last week’s Poem of the Week, Charles Wright’s “Self Portrait,” was culled from the very first issue of TMR (way back in ’78) and it strikes me as particularly significant – not just because it’s a great poem (and it undeniably is) – but because it marks the inception of Wright’s larger project of spiritual autobiography, a project that has exerted a massive influence on contemporary poetry.  In this early poem, we see the speaker offering a number of provisional versions of the self:  “Charles on the Trevisan,” followed by “Charles on the San Trovaso,” who dissolves into “broken chords / in tiny striations above the air.”  The apparently solid self – that dweller on bridges and reader of earmarked pages – is revealed to be something essentially transient, such that even “The wind will edit him.”  This implies that any attempt to narrate the self, to pin down such a Protean thing in fixed text, is always doomed to inaccuracy. 

But Wright doesn’t stop here; in fact, this is the beginning of a project that spans nearly thirty years and three trilogies:  Country Music, The World of the Ten Thousand Things and Negative Blue.  At the broadest level, one could look at all three works as attempts to articulate the elusive and ever-changing self which seems always to be sliding away, requiring an endless string of visions and revisions.  There is “No slatch in the undertow” which pulls the self through time.  But Wright refuses to accept the impossibility of his desire, and, unlike many of his contemporaries, he avoids the temptation to wallow in fragmentation.  His guiding light here is St. Augustine, whose Confessions, as Wright himself admits, “somehow gave me the ‘permission’ I needed to embark on my own project of self-examination and self-disclosure.”[1]  As one who wove even his darkest confessions into an artful whole, Augustine looms large in this poem.  He is the figure who dwells “Inside, in the crosslight,” at the deepest level of the self, where he, like the poet, spends his time “striking the words out.”  Here, Wright puns on “striking” so that the word signifies both “typing” and “omitting” – the dual process of the continuous autobiography that will define most of his career.

I find it striking (pun intended) that TMR published this particular poem in its first issue because it stands at the beginning of something so much larger.  Along with Wright, TMR was then embarking on a journey of self-definition and self-discovery which is ongoing, always opening out into new regions of knowledge and risk.  As Wright has composed endless sketches of his changing face, TMR has traced the shifting face of contemporary literature for nearly thirty years.  It seems fitting, then, that the two projects share a common root, which renders the subsequent changes all the more meaningful.  As another great contemporary poet (and a teacher of mine) puts it:

 

I am slowly learning one thing;

of one thing I am slowly becoming

aware:  whether or not I would

have it so, whether I sleep

or no, I will be changed.

I am changing as I speak.[2]

 

Poetry is what we have made – continue to make – of the changes.  And why not?

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[1] Charles Wright.  “The Books That Changed My Life.”   

[2] Scott Cairns.  The Translation of Raimundo Luz

Audio Poetry: “Departure in New Affection and New Noise”

In a letter to Paul Demeny, Rimbaud argues “All ancient poetry culminated in Greek poetry, harmonious Life.” For Rimbaud, this harmony involves both mind and body: “verses and lyres, rhythms: Action.” This is a far cry from the dominant perspective that sees poetry first and foremost as text. The poem, for the ancient Greek of Rimbaud’s imagination, is not simply a collection of black strokes on a white page (what he calls mere “games” or “pasttimes”), but a living enactment, an incarnation, a singing. While “voices and lyres” may sound a bit precious to the modern ear, the rhythm and action of a poet’s voice still adds an irreplaceable dimension to the poem itself. Inflection, emphasis, innuendo, sarcasm, silliness: all of these nuances become distinct only when a living voice articulates what is otherwise just a series of marks on a page. For what is text but the disappearance of speech?

Poetry as text is the disappearance of poetry as living speech. This is worth remembering. As text, the poem exists in the alienation of the poet from himself or herself (as well as the alienation of the speaker from his or her audience). Speech becomes an autonomous artifact like an unwound grandfather clock made of words. Rimbaud sees this movement from poetry as embodied speech to poetry as disembodied text as a narrative of decline–one of a vast number of human “Falls” from various hazy Edens. The fall from speech into textuality is one phase in the greater fragmentation of human reality. It is one of the originary representational acts, and thus stands at the beginning of all simulation (and dissimulation). Postmodernity could perhaps be understood as the historical culmination of the logic of disembodied textuality: text, divorced from voice, running rampant. Consider, for instance, the rootless language of popular marketing or the pompous, empty air of contemporary political discourse. Ours is an age of endlessly accelerating signification, defined by a paralyzing doubt in the possibility of meaning, legitimation, and authority.

But for every paradise lost there is (I would like to think) one to be regained. Paradoxically, the same technology that has intensified our self-estrangement (writing) has made possible technologies (such as digital recording) that are capable of reintegrating voice and text. Personally, I have grown up with this technology, so my experience of poetry as a living fact has been altered and enhanced by it. For instance, I remember the first time I heard Ginsberg’s “Howl” on a tin-speakered, late-night computer. After the fact, it was impossible to separate the prophet from the prophecy. Then, there are the vintage classics, such as Yeat’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” where you hear the Irish bard like a mellifluous ghost singing through static. You can hear Pound’s manic, intelligent cadences and Eliot’s ultracivilized, unsettling monotone . Somewhere you can access Kerouac’s laughter during a reading of Mexico City Blues and Berryman’s weird rest-and-half-rest-riddled versions of the Dream Songs . When read by the poet, the poem changes. And we are changed in the hearing.

The medium of audio poetry offers the possibility of a reunion between voice and text (and also between speaker and audience). In a sense, text becomes testament. Is it possible to listen to the passion of an Amiri Baraka reading and then consider the words as if they were simply “text” again? When poetry is animated by the voice, a new kind of intensity (which is actually a very old type of intensity) becomes possible; the recorded voice binds the enduring phrase to its disappearing creator. Could it be that technology will change the way in which we understand poetry itself?

I hope so.

This is one of the reasons I am excited about TMR’s upcoming Audio Competition. By giving priority to the spoken poem (not to mention fiction, drama, etc.), this contest marks a shift in the culture of the literary magazine. Text is no longer everything. I hope that digital recording technology will make possible not only a reunion of voice and text, but also a new era of experimentation and expanded artistic horizons. I can imagine a new medium of digital audio poetry with unique and yet-to-be-articulated aesthetic principles. The poem becomes open to ambient sound, the grinding of machinery, howl, echo and reverberation. It becomes pure soundscape. Again, the poem comes to include more “harmonious Life,” as Rimbaud has it. Perhaps in that opening up we will find something new in ourselves.

Poetry: the Art of Pleasure and Balance

As a scribbler of poems, I have often asked myself what is the promise of poetry?  In what consists the peculiar pleasure of the well-crafted poem?  The first answer that comes to mind is obvious:  pleasure.  The poem pleases through a kind of transportation – literally, a carrying across – of the self from the mundane to the visionary by means of language cunningly wrought.  The poem is the room where rhythm and meaning meet,  an ecstatic rendezvous.  But pleasure is only part of the puzzle, and the end of hedonism is always boredom. 

Annie Finch recently articulated another answer:  balance.  She argues, “Poetry offers balance between the logical, verbal left side of the brain and the musical, spatial right side of the brain, combining meaning and rhythm as no other art can do. Poetry uses the same words we all use every day, and so it transmutes the intimate chatter of our lives into something more powerful.”  So the poem both transports and transmutes.  Through an elaborate, cerebral balancing act that harmonizes meaning and rhythm, the poem carries us until, like Wordsworth by the Wye, “Almost suspended, we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul.” [Read the rest of Finch's essay here.]

This “suspension” is a function of rhythm, and, as Eliot quipped, “No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.”  It is through rhythm and meter that we are either lulled or shaken into receptivity.  Consider Yeats’s conclusion to “Among School Children”:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

 

This iambic rhythm lulls the mind into an almost hypnagogic space and, thus, prepares the way for two of the most debated (but undeniably profound) questions in English poetry.  The rhythm rocks us to sleep, while the meaning startles us into thought.  As Finch contends, “poetry transports us in a way that no other art can do, because it brings the conscious and unconscious mind into a new relation.”  This “new relation” can be conceived as a kind of yoga, yoking together the conscious and unconscious – a delicate balance.  It could be said that poetry transcends the apparent binary of conscious/unconscious through a rhythmic opening to the mythic potential of language.  In sum, the poem transports, transmutes, and transcends. 

By “passing beyond” the limits of binary opposition, poetry refreshes the common spring of language.  New linguistic possibilities burst like fervent zinnia buds after rain.  And like the steady patter of rain, rhythm carries us to a place where language is always renewing itself.  Philip Larkin puts it memorably in a poem that I have admired for some time:

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

 

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old?  No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

 

- Tim Hayes