A sense of displacement

“There is a mystery and poignance to the way poets find one another. The process can never be mutual. It is always the younger poet in a later generation who does the finding. It is always left to the younger poet to work out a process built on artifice and illusion: to make a connection across time and distance that is part scrutiny and all invention. At the end of the process, after all the memorising and inscribing, the older poet remains intact in both meaning and achievement. It is the younger one who is revealed.”

We wrote about Irish poet Eavan Boland a few days ago, with her address at the Hopwoods Awards ceremony at the University of Michigan. Then I found this June 10 article in the Irish Times, “Saving grace: how WB Yeats helped Eavan Boland to become a poet.”

She discovered William Butler Yeats as a teenager: “What was revealed to me was how willing I was in this initial encounter to enter a Yeatsian world of lakes, of spirits hidden inside mountain winds and heroic legends. How easily I passed into all this, like an unchallenged ghost. Now I look back, I know the key to my first response was not the truth of his representation but the depth of my own displacement.

His world of lakes and spirits

“I had returned to Ireland at the age of 14 having lived for years outside the country. I knew instinctively that I lacked a secret language of location that turns a child into an adult who fits in. I missed the sense of belonging that both reveals and restricts the meaning of place. Without those signals of self I was able to accept without questioning Yeats’s artifice and invention: his landscapes filled with improbable spirits and perfect language needed no standard of proof for me. There was no other place waiting for me. I adopted his and made it my own.

“So began my late teenage years and the beginning of my 20s, when I knew many of his poems by heart. Stanzas, epigrams, exclamations guided some inner space whenever I summoned them. His words entered my mind the way melody enters the mind of someone who loves songs: a framing device well beyond the subject matter of what’s remembered. It seemed back then that I had acquired not just a possession but also a comfort zone. And I might have remained there. I might have stayed grateful for the Virgilian companionship of a poet whose well-phrased dramas and dramatic phrases brought more dignity to my everyday life than I could have provided.”

The encounter goes on. Read the rest of this beautiful essay here.

I don’t think much about children’s literature. I haven’t read much …. oh, since I was a child. I’m not one of those people who gets all misty-eyed about childhood, but I recently ran across this lovely passage, at the very end of Laura Ingall Wilder‘s Little House in the Big Woods, and I wondered if I missed something on first reading, decades ago:

It’s still now now.

“When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?”

“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep, now.”

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”

Mary Pope Osborne and her husband at the White House, 2007.

One more reason to reconsider: I recently became acquainted with Mary Pope Osborne, author of the Magic Tree House series, which has sold more than 100 million copies and been translated into 30 languages – success by any standards, but there’s more. The popularity of the series surpassed that of Harry Potter as #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list in 2006 (and I’ve never read Harry Potter, either). The series has been awarded by the National Council of Teachers of English, the American Booksellers Association, and she also received the Ludington Memorial Award from the Educational Paperback Association and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Random House Sales Force.

Here’s what enchanted me in the video a friend sent me above. She based a children’s book on Ovid‘s Metamorphoses, and the sad story of the Alcyone, daughter of the god of the wind, and her drowned husband Ceyx. Alcyone returns to the sea each day, waiting for his return, and Aphrodite, at last taking pity on her, sends the divine messenger Iris to the house of Sleep (a.k.a. Morpheus) to arranges a nighttime visitation, to convince the grief-stricken queen her cause is lost. In Mary’s rendering, in her 1989 A Visit to Sleep’s House, the story turns a sort of lullaby, where “drowsy Sleep lives in a cloud-covered house.” All is quiet as “you walk up Sleep’s pathway” where “no owl calls out, ‘Who?’ / and no dog barks under the moon.” Wild animals, geese, cows, are similarly soundless. At last she sees Sleep, a shadowed figure wearing a nightcap, “lying on an old wooden bed” beside yours, and you fall asleep listening to the river that “whispers, Good night, good night.” The mini-reading begins around 34.00.

Somewhere in my messy house, I have a big fat edition of Ovid, but I can’t find it. But I recalled that the sad story of Alcyone inspired another Mary – Mary Zimmerman, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow – in her remarkable play Metamorphosis. While looking for the fat Ovid, I found instead my slim paperback of the play, in which Iris calls Sleep “Mildest of all the gods, soother of souls, and healer of wearied and pain-wracked bodies and minds.” As a result, the inconsolable Alcyone gets a nighttime visit from the shrouded ghost of her husband. As he retreats to the sea, “She began to run to him; but as she ran, crying, a strange thing happened.” Then, in an Ovidian turn, the gods have mercy – she becomes a bird, and so does he:

For the dead body was changing, restored to life,
and renewed as another seabird.
Together they still fly, just over the water’s surface,
and mate and rear their young, and for seven days each winter
Alcyone broods on her next that floats on the gentled water –
for Aeolus, her father, then keeps the winds short reined
and every year gives seven days of calm upon the ocean –
the days we call the halcyon days.

And that is how Mary Zimmerman signed my book at Stanford, with two birds over the sea.

And now to bed.

“When I arrived at his home in the Sierra Nevada foothills in May of 1998, Gary Snyder was covered with ants. He was on the roof of a shed, straddling solar panels and pulling out insulation that a colony of carpenter ants had claimed as its own,” recalled Eric Todd Smith. “A few minutes later, he was showing me around his tool shed and the old barn that houses his office, occasionally slapping at stray ants crawling in his hair. We talked about how to use the old crosscut saw and logging cables hanging from the walls, about local birds and trees, and eventually wound our way into poetry, Buddhist philosophy, and natural resource management. Such simultaneous immersion in concrete tasks and abstract ideas is normal for Snyder, who has lived with his family at Kitkitdizze, the house he built himself, since the early 1970s. His long poem, Mountain and Rivers Without End, testifies to his conviction that the quotidian and the cosmic are inseparable.”

With this passage, Smith introduces his unpublished interview with the Pultitzer prize-winning poet Gary Snyder – but he’s also introducing the man himself. It’s only one chapter in A Sense of the Whole: Reading Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End, edited by Mark Gonnerman. Some of you locals will remember Mark as the amiable and informed host of the Aurora Forum public conversations at Stanford. There’s lots to recall Stanford in this new volume, published by Counterpoint in Berkeley.

Snyder’s book-length poem was published in spring 1996. In December of that year, Snyder read from the poem at the legendary independent bookstore Kepler’s, just down the street from Stanford (we wrote about its history here). Gonnerman was in the audience, and perhaps that was something of an inspiration for the year-long research workshop Gonnerman organized at the Stanford Humanities Center in 1997. Scholars, writers, faculty, students, and community members met regularly to discuss Snyder’s 39-poem cycle, Mountains and Rivers Without End.  

The new volume includes the October 8, 1997, conversation at Stanford’s East House between Snyder, Gonnerman, and Counterpoint publisher, Jack Shoemaker. The following night, October 9, Snyder read a large portion of the poem to a full house at Kresge Auditorium on the Stanford campus. It also has a short Stanford discussion between Gonnerman, Carl Bielefeldt, and Charles Junkerman.

It includes essays by other participants at the year-long Stanford Mountains and Rivers celebration, such as David Abram, Wendell Berry, Carl Bielefeldt, Tim Dean, Jim Dodge, Robert Hass, Stephanie Kaza, Julia Martin, Michael McClure, Nano Sakaki, and Katsunori Yamazato.

The poem is “a complex, engaging, and, I presume, enduring work of art,” writes Gonnerman, but a work of art that’s hard to classify: “Is it an ‘American epic poem’ (M&R dust jacket)? A multimedia poem cycle? A contribution to American mythology? A collection of poems depicting major ecosystem types? Is it a spiritual autobiography – a pilgrim’s progress – aimed at effecting some kind of religious conversion?” Clearly, all of the above for Gonnerman, who intended the book as a guide to the poem, as well as an homage.

But he had another purpose, too: “One of the most pressing problems in American education and society at large is a breakdown of community owing to specialization, a trend that has infected even undergraduate life,” Gonnerman writes. He says “the book aims to inspire others to organize learning communities around poetic and allied arts. Our Mountains & Rivers Workshop began in an effort to turn the contemporary research multiversity into a university once again, if only for a moment.”

(Postscript: I have never met Gary Snyder, even while living nearby in the Sierra foothills for years. But we briefly exchanged emails two years ago, after Mark had mentioned that René Girard once spent an evening eating horsemeat with the foothills poet.  That was so far-fetched I had to check it out. I finally reached him via a mutual friend. Sorry, he said, although he’d cooked and eaten horsemeat before, he’d never done so with the renowned immortel of the Académie Française. Now if you should hear that rumor, you can squash it, too. Like an ant.)

Antless at Columbia, 2007 (Creative Commons)

“To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.”  

— Czesław Miłosz, Road-side Dog

David Sanders over at Poetry News in Review brought “Miłosz and His Fans” in Ontario’s Brick Magazine to our attention, and we’re mightily grateful. Molly Wesling was an assistant to Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz in the early 1990s (we’ve written about him here and here, and a gazillion other places). Her reminiscences of the Polish poet (here) absolutely sparkles with gems. Here are a few paragraphs:

The indignities of aging were on the poet’s mind. He was translating the poems of Anna Swir (aka Świrszczyńska, 1909–1984), his friend from Warsaw, into English in collaboration with Leonard Nathan. Swir wrote about what happens when bodies decay and disappoint, and Miłosz admired her candour, rare for a Polish woman of her generation. His own writing from this period onward is full of such meditations. “They were betrayed by their bodies, once beautiful and ready to dance. Yet in every one a lamp of consciousness is burning, hence their wonder: ‘Is this me? But it can’t be so!’”

Still, the world rose up to smooth the poet’s path. One of the perks of being a Nobel laureate at University of California, Berkeley—at that time there were about fifteen, Miłosz the only winner in a non-scientific field—is your own parking space on campus for life. Miłosz also had the privilege of scoring a table at a moment’s notice at the wildly popular restaurant Chez Panisse. In Berkeley these were fairy-tale prizes, like flying carpets or enchanted pots that never run out of porridge.

Over the phone in the fall of 1990, Miłosz described where to catch the bus to his house and cautioned me about the many “lacunae” in the bus schedule. I knew then I’d caught the golden ring of part-time jobs. In between letters I jotted down a few of his asides. I’ve saved my notebooks, which is why I can quote from them twenty-five years later. Once, Miłosz looked at me as I was writing and said, “I used to be left-handed too, but they beat it out of me.” On Joseph Brodsky: “he is a genius”; Robert Frost: “marvellous”; the Laments by Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski: “should be ranked with the world classics”; and my favourite: “these poems are awful” (I can’t say whose).

Feed me.

Miłosz and Carol were away for the year of 1991–92. I collected the mail and sent it to Chapel Hill. Ted was in charge of watering the bushes of the main house and tending to the needs of Tiny, the ancient Russian Blue who appears once or twice in the Miłosz oeuvre—both as himself and as a representative of the violent animal world. Through our weekly tryst at Miłosz’s aerie, Ted and I had become a couple, complete with grey cat, like the “Old World Landowners” from Nikolai Gogol’s short story of that name. When the eighty-one-year-old Master finally arrived back at his Berkeley home, he immediately noticed the dying rhododendrons and Tiny’s untidy litter box and was annoyed. Miłosz climbed back up the flagstone path to the carriage house and commenced a dressing-down. Later that evening he returned, this time to offer Ted a heartfelt apology the way only Miłosz could—eyebrows twitching, a humble bow of the head.

Read the whole thing here.

She oughta know. (Photo courtesy Eavan Boland)

I have an especial fondness for the Avery Hopwood awards at the University of Michigan. During my days as a student in Ann Arbor, I was awarded two – just like playwright Arthur Miller. That might be the only thing we have in common. But the early encouragement meant a lot.

So I was very pleased that Stanford’s Eavan Boland, one of Ireland’s leading poets, delivered this year’s address on April 22. Her subject: what advice can older writers give younger ones? She has her doubts about how far words can go, but I like Nicholas Del Banco‘s comment, which she cited: “the conflicted self is crucial.” He was commenting about novels – but I think the comment embraces all genres (so does she).

Her thoughts on the subject took her back to Dublin – “improbably a city where lightning had struck. In a figurative, artistic way that is.” She described this story between two Irish writers in a a smoking room in a Dublin café, in 1902:

The meeting took place on O’Connell Street which was then Sackville Street. It was a wide street in a garrison city which was still under British rule and would remain so for fourteen years. And all of this in a country, which was considered a backwater of Europe. Not a country that people – except for a few deep inside its secret societies – held out much hope for. The meeting was between two men, two writers, who had never met before. One was in his middle thirties and one a mere twenty years of age.

The two men were William Yeats and the very young James Joyce. And they were not equals. Yeats was already an iconic figure. He had founded the Irish theater. He had written admired poetry. Joyce had yet to write anything important. When I think of the hazards of this sort of advice I think of what happened next. Before any conversation could be started, James Joyce leaned across the table to William Yeats and said, “You are too old for me to help you.”

Then she told her own story, also in Dublin, decades later when she was a student at Trinity College, studying English literature in a place where poetry was treated as “a canonical fact.” She had no idea that Irish poetry had “been forced to shine out of a darkness with effort and pain.”

And then at the age of 18 I picked up a book called The Hidden Ireland by a writer I had never heard of, Daniel Corkery. It had been published in 1925. The book follows the shattered narrative of the Cromwellian clearances in Ireland in the 18th century. It alights in their aftermath in a small part of Gaelic Munster, which is called Slieve Luachra, a mountainous area on the Cork Kerry border. Corkery writes about poets such as Aodhagán Ó Rathaille and Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin. He records that they spoke the Irish language and wrote their poetry in it. That they were witnesses to the destruction of that language and the breaking apart of the Bardic order. “What Pindar is to Greece, what Burns is to Scotland  … that and much more is Eoghan Ruadh to Ireland,” wrote Corkery.

That evening as I read on I could see what Robert Penn Warren meant when he said “the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see.” I stopped on one page, and at one passage. Everything I was or hoped to be listened to what those words said.

Here is the passage the passage from Corkery that turned her on and, perhaps, changed her life: “Then we must also remember that these poets were simple men, living as peasants in rural surroundings; some of them, probably, never saw a city; not only this, but they were all poor men, very often sore-troubled where and how to find shelter, clothing, food, at the end of a day’s tramping. Their native culture is ancient, harking back to pre-Renaissance standards; but there is no inflow of books from outside to impregnate it with new thoughts. Their language is dying: around them is the drip, drip of callous decay: famine overtakes famine, or the people are cleared from the land to make room for bullocks. The rocks in hidden mountain clefts are the only altars left to them; and teaching is a felony.”

“Not to excuse, but to explain them, are these facts mentioned; for their poetry, though doubtless the poorest chapter in .the book of Irish literature, is in itself no poor thing that needs excuse: it is, contrariwise, a rich thing, a marvelous inheritance, bright with music, flushed with colour, deep with human feeling. To see it against the dark world that threw it up, is to be astonished, if not dazzled.”

Merciless obsessions.

Eavan Boland continues: “I can remember where I was when I read this. Even now I ask myself – why was I so moved by an assertion nobody could prove; about poets from another world, most of them lost to time and history? I believe I was moved because it was the first time I had come across a bold statement about the importance of the artist ‘s life. It was the first time I had read that language and literature could testify in and through time; that such testimony could pierce the darkness of a history. It was the first time anyone had expressed the dignity of the life I hoped I would live.”

The rest led her to “a life lived in and through language, with all its challenge and reward. This won’t change and has never changed.” Let me close with some of more of the great advice from great writers she cited. This one, from the Prague-born German-language author Franz Kafka: “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

“Were you busy writing your heart out?”

And this piece closer to home, from America’s J.D. Salinger: “Do you know what you will be asked when you die? Let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished – I think only poor Soren K. will get asked that. I’m so sure you’ll only get asked two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions.”

Francophile (Photo: Ron Haviv)

Marcia DeSanctis and I met the modern way – in cyberspace, over her previously unpublished interview with Joseph Brodsky. Now I’ll meet her face-to-face – and you’ll have a chance to meet her, too, at the same time.

She’ll be speaking at the Stanford Bookstore at 6 p.m. tomorrow – that’s Wednesday, June 10, 2015. The subject is one dear to her heart: France. Her 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go is for the serious Francophile – well, we wrote about the book here, in a post titled “We’ll always have Paris: 100 reasons to go back, right away.”  The award-winning author draws on years of travels and living in France to lead you through vineyards, architectural treasures, fabled gardens and contemplative hikes from Biarritz to Deauville, Antibes to the French Alps.

Marcia is a former television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News and has written for the New York Times, Vogue, and others: her book quickly hit the New York Times Travel Best Seller list shortly after its release last November. As I wrote a few months ago:

After a quick glance through, I began scribbling notes, picking quarrels, marking passages with stars, brackets, exclamation points, or question marks in the margins. The book is addictive, like crack, and I could see I wasn’t going to get much done unless I hid it somewhere in the midst of my piles of books and papers. And so it waited.

Marcia is a former television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News and an accomplished journalist (we’ve also written about her here), and she hardly needed a boost from me: the book quickly hit the New York Times Travel Best Seller list shortly after its release last November. Not bad, considering it was published by a small, off-the-beaten-track house. Coincidentally, the publisher is in Palo Alto – Travelers’ Tales, an imprint of Solas House.

The book abounds with solid advice on where to shop, where to go for a long afternoon walk, where to find the best wines, and where to eat, eat, eat. Typical of her advice on the latter: “Some of the best meals I’ve ever had in France have been haphazard affairs, slapped together with a quick trip to the Marché d’Aligre near the Bastille – ripe Rocamadour cheese and saucisson aux noix, bread, and a salad of mâche trucked in that morning from the Loire Valley. It’s important to dine like this in France … while uncorking a decent Beaujolais from the corner store…

He’s waiting, Marcia.

As for her own story, she writes on her website here: “I graduated from Princeton, where I studied creative writing with Russell Banks but majored in Russian language and literature. I still love those writers and wish I had the attention span to read Dostoevsky’s collected works again. … Moscow is still one of my favorite places on earth.”

I’m with you on Moscow, Marcia. As for the attention span, that’s what the internet will do to you.

Postscript on 6/11:  Marcia DeSanctis is on the road again … but what is she reading? “When I travel, once I’ve rounded up my documents and stuffed the carry-on to bursting, the last thing I pack is a book. I slip whatever I have chosen between my change of clothes and my blanket, and close the zipper. I appreciate that e-books have, for some people, erased the need to make an absolute decision on what single piece of literature will accompany them on a journey. But on the road, I prefer a tactile, 3D, lick-my-finger-and-turn-the-page hard copy, the kind I’ve toted around for decades, stealing sentences in cafes, train stations and hotel beds all across the planet.  For me, a book is a well-considered traveling companion…” Read her discussion of her travel reading in today’s Tin House. It’s here.