My New and Collected Poems, 1976-2015 has just appeared from Beacon Press, and I couldn’t be happier with the results – a lovely looking book that has allowed me to gather my poems of the last ten years – the “new” part of the title – and reprint most of the poems I really want to stand by from earlier volumes. It’s not a “complete” poems, but it’s close.
As a young man writing poems – mostly in Scotland, where I spent seven years at the University of St. Andrews – I never really envisioned a day when, as approached the age of 70 (I’m 68), I would have an opportunity like this, to gather my poems of four decades under one cover. I remember holding in my hands the collected poems of Eliot and Frost, Stevens, Roethke, Bishop, and others. There was something immensely satisfying about seeing the work of a lifetime in a book.
Of course, I hope this is not “the work of a lifetime.” I wouldn’t mind having a couple of more decades to write poems, and I’m assuming that with the experiences I’ve had in poetry down all these decades, somehow I’ll be equipped to face my later years freshly, finding a language adequate to this experience.
I’ve always been drawn to the work of older poets. Frost, for instance, found the most perfect poem, “Directive,” and quite late in his writing life. It’s the best of Frost: subtle and deeply in command of the kind of blank verse he had made his own, with memorable lines, with a spry and off-kilter humor, with a ruefulness that only Frost could muster. It doesn’t have the slightly cute feel of “Mending Wall” or “Birches” – poems I love, but not in the same way. This long poem is about winding your way “back” into the woods, back to a house in the woods that has been reduced to a cellar hole, near a brook. It ends: “Here are your water and your water-place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”
For Frost, life was confusing. A poem for him was “a momentary stay against confusion.” It was a clearing in the crazy woods of our time, his time, his own psyche. And I can’t help but thinking Frost’s own mind was, at times, a miserable thicket – I wrote a biography of Frost in 1999, so I’m familiar with the issues that drove him: a lack of self-confidence, a narcissistic turn, a persistent battle with depression. I’m not a shrink, but it seems obvious that Frost struggled with a mood disorder that informs his poetry from the beginning to the end.
I’m going to be writing these blogs for the coming week, and in them I will explore some of the difficulties that poets have faced in the later parts of their careers. I’ll look at Yeats and Stevens. I’ll think about T.S. Eliot. I’ll talk about my old friend and mentor Robert Penn Warren, whom I knew very well in the last decade or so of his life (he lived not so far down the road from me in Vermont, where he is buried in a country churchyard in West Wardsboro). And I will hope these explorations prove useful for younger poets.
I will also take the liberty of talking about my own poetry – a craft that has obsessed me, informed my life, shaped my dreams and opened my heart, over this past fifty years or so.
It’s fair to say I started writing seriously in college, as a freshman – exactly fifty years ago. I was a very bad poet, one who had read almost nothing of consequence – so my work had the immaturity and adventurousness of young people. It wasn’t until I got to Scotland in 1968 that I began to read poetry with a kind of steadiness that has become part of my continuing work. I ran into the poet Alastair Reid, who became an important mentor; and I met a young teacher called Tony Ashe – a brisk and bright lecturer who had recently finished his graduate work in Oxford. He took me carefully through poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donne, Yeats. Eliot, Pope and Wordsworth.
Those classes were a revelation to me, and I learned what “close reading” meant. To my amazement, I’ve continued to reread so many of these poets. And I’ve continued to allow myself, as a writer, to join their conversation.
I never really like the idea that poetry was a contest, with writers struggling to outdo each other. I much prefer the notion of dialogue, and I have found myself in perpetual dialogue with Frost and Stevens, Roethke, Charles Simic, Louise Glück, Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Wright – just to name some obvious ones. I’ll explore the nature of this conversation in these posting as well.
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