In a recent Best American Poetry blog, “On Meditation,” by Victoria Kelly (October 5, 2015), I found myself touched by her reference to Richard Wilbur’s “beautiful, slim volume,” The Beautiful Changes, published in 1947. It was Wilbur’s first book of poems, and Wilbur had been one of my very first poets. As a student (and I thought then an athlete), I had been mesmerized by the delicate acrobatics of “Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning,” collected in his Things of This World (1956). The poem was subsequently included in Lawrence Perrine’s popular mid-twentieth-century anthology Sound and Sense, An Introduction to Poetry, where I initially came across it. The anthology is still in print, I see, now in its 10th edition. In 9th grade, I had no idea what the Spanish Steps were or, for that matter, what the poem’s title referred to. I had studied only some French in school and not yet been to Italy, but I was to become a devoted reader of Wilbur thereafter, thanks, in part, to this anthology.
Kelly’s reference was touching for another reason. Her discovery was of a different sort than mine. She came upon Wilbur later in life and as an author and accomplished poet in her own right, but in between, in the trans-shifting of time, Wilbur’s rather extraordinary first book of poetry had been apparently lost to sight, indeed perhaps to an entire generation of readers. Glad as I was for her discovery, in other words, I couldn’t altogether banish a sense of loathed melancholy that comes with meditating on time and generational change, with each wave seemingly “changing place with that which went before.”
The blog this week which I am guest authoring is not about Wilbur but another gifted poet of the same post-World-War-II generation, Anthony Hecht (1923-2004), whose often sublimely beautiful, highly crafted, and sometimes terrifying poems I came to admire deeply over a long period of time, as I did the person. I was fortunate to edit his Selected Letters (Johns Hopkins, 2013), and from this experience tempted into thinking I had something to say about the poems that might be of interest to others, and perhaps even stave off, if not reverse, the tide of amnesia often involving poetry that is no longer of the present moment. Oxford was kind enough to issue a contract and to publish A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht in 2015. (Hecht has long had a loyal readership in England, originally as part of the Oxford series of poetry, now because of the ever-growing Waywiser Press and the annual prize it offers bearing Hecht’s name.) The Oxford book cover is from a beautiful painting by Vittore Carpaccio, The Patriarch of Grado heals a Possessed Man, sometimes also called A Miracle with the Holy Relic of the True Cross. I chose the painting partly in homage to Hecht. Venice was a favorite place of his: the intricate, alley-scoped city, with its brilliantly changing skies, serves as the setting for one of his most glorious poems, “The Venetian Vespers.” But I was also attracted by the procession of small ghostly figures in white walking across a wooden bridge—brothers of the Scuola di San Giovanni, art historians tell us. I wondered what they, like so many of Hecht’s ghosts, were doing. I took the book’s title from one of Hecht’s later dramatic monologues, “The Transparent Man.” It aims to situate the reader in the rich particulars of Hecht’s poetry, often in relation to that of the literary past and the present, Hecht’s present that is, from Shakespeare to James Merrill, and with frequent references to those powerful motors of the poetic imagination, love and war. The book proceeds slowly, at least to my way of thinking, but is also, in a different sense, unfinished. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t discover an idea, a phrase, written by someone, that I wish could be added.
Poetry is always in the process of being lost, and found, Hecht’s no less than Wilbur’s no less than Milton’s. Will there be a time when even Elizabeth Bishop’s star will decline? It seems almost unthinkable. It’s possible that Hecht’s poetry is more vulnerable than some to time’s scythe, although it might take Occam’s razor to parse these matters more carefully than I can do. But if so, it’s not, I think, because of his evident mastery of poetic form, which has many defenders as well as practitioners today, but because of his belief in a version of literary history—what used to be called the “canon” when there were enough readers around for that term to have meaning—that requires being at the table a long time in order to sample and digest poetry’s many offerings, the allusions and references, the other voices, that figure into and thicken his verse, one of whose intended consequences, ironically enough, is to amplify and complicate, not diminish, the poet’s voice. Reduce the sound board and the lines become less resonant, harder to hear. Cut out the past altogether, as has happened in many English departments across the country, and yet another writer disappears into the night. When asked by members of the public what I teach, I used to say poetry from Wyatt to the present. Now I just say “Shakespeare.” Soon, it will be “Shakespeare and Film,” but not by me.
Still, “fit audience find though few” has long been poetry’s mantra. As I was musing over Milton’s famous line, and those talismanic words linked by alliteration, a novelist friend, a former winner of the National Book Award, offered some unintended balm. Feeling the sting of oblivion that often comes with the book trade--she had just looked at a long shelf of utterly forgotten fiction by one author—she remarked: “at least poets have the possibility of being anthologized.” So true, I thought. Fit readers of poetry seem always possible, always in the making, as most of us know, and can be found in strange places, can find poetry in strange places, however few such readers are. Who would think that the poet Don Paterson would feel the need to write a 500 page commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets partly in order not to have to pretend any longer that he knew the poems better than he did?
One of the distinct pleasures in writing my book on Hecht was furthering my understanding of a poet’s art and the traditions--verbal, visual, and musical—that helped to nurture it. A close second involved discovering other readers of Hecht in the process, indeed many others along the way in unexpected quarters who also knew, admired, and, in some cases, were influenced by Hecht’s poetry. Paterson, it happens, is one of them, but only one of them. So it occurred to me, in accepting the role of guest author, to invite a few of these fit readers, who are also poets, to write about a Hecht poem of their choosing. In order of appearance, they are V. Penelope Pelizzon, whose most recent book of poems, Whose Flesh is Flame, Whose Bone is Time (2014), was a finalist for the eighth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize; Stephen Edgar, one of Australia’s finest poets, vigorously and rightly championed by Clive James: James once thought Richard Wilbur was a major source of influence on Edgar until, over a second bottle of Cloudy Bay, Edgar remarked that as much as he admired Wilbur, “Hecht had been the man”; and Judith Hall, a Guggenheim fellow and the author of four poetry collections, including Three Trios, who describes herself as “distantly related to Anthony Hecht." The brief bios given here are slanted in relation to the blog’s subject, and though forming only a small constellation of the many possible Hecht readers, it still almost rings the world--from Sydney to Southern California to Connecticut to Oxford.
These posts from Mr. Post are refreshingly literary. Keep posting them!
Posted by: Richard Pratt | November 26, 2015 at 08:17 PM