hostile

"I set up The Dream Songs as hostile to every visible tendency in both American and English poetry."

- John Berryman, from his National Book Award acceptance speech

berryman on teaching

INTERVIEWER

Well, that covers scholarship. How about teaching? Does teaching only get in the way of your work as a poet?

BERRYMAN

It depends on the kind of teaching you do. If you teach creative writing, you get absolutely nothing out of it. Or English—what are you teaching? People you read twenty years ago. Maybe you pick up a little if you keep on preparing, but very few people keep on preparing. Everybody is lazy, and poets, in addition to being lazy, have another activity which is very demanding, so they tend to slight their teaching. But I give courses in the history of civilization, and when I first began teaching here I nearly went crazy. I was teaching Christian origins and the Middle Ages, and I had certain weak spots. I was OK with The Divine Comedyand certain other things, but I had an awful time of it. I worked it out once, and it took me nine hours to prepare a fifty-minute lecture. I have learned much more from giving these lecture courses than I ever learned at Columbia or Cambridge. It has forced me out into areas where I wouldn't otherwise have been, and since I am a scholar, these things are connected. I make myself acquainted with the scholarship.

Suppose I'm lecturing on Augustine. My Latin is very rusty, but I'll pay a certain amount of attention to the Latin text in the Loeb edition, with the English across the page. Then I'll visit the library and consult five or six old and recent works on St. Augustine, who is a particular interest of mine, anyway. Now all that becomes part of your equipment for poetry, even for lyric poetry. The Bradstreet poem is a very learned poem. There is a lot of theology in it, there is a lot of theology in The Dream Songs. Anything is useful to a poet. Take observation of nature, of which I have absolutely none. It makes possible a world of moral observation for Frost or Hopkins. So scholarship and teaching are directly useful to my activity as a writer.

(This interview, done by Peter A. Stitt, appeared in the winter 1972 issue of The Paris Review, which can be read here.)

Form is a father: when I looked for form,

I found a leaf, and on the leaf a worm.

- Theodore Roethke

from Straw for the Fire, pg. 89

a poem you are unable to write

"You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest."
- John Berryman

an artist and his words

"You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way."
— William Carlos Williams

"Before you are wild, you first have to be, not tame, but capable of being contained; or containing yourself, your psyche: that which is stored up."

- Theodore Roethke, from his notebooks.

the worst possible ordeal

"I have . . . a feeling that endowment is a very small part of achievement. I would rate it about fifteen or twenty percent. Then you have historical luck, personal luck, health, things like that, then you have hard work, sweat. And you have ambition. . . . I do feel strongly that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. . . . My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him"

- John Berryman ['The Art of Poetry XVI' Paris Review, winter 1972]

two from stephen dunn

"I don't trust people until I know what they love. If they cannot admit to what they love, or in fact love nothing, I cannot take even their smartest criticisms seriously."

"Lovers are unreliable witnesses, which is why reliability is not always to be desired."

- Stephen Dunn

not understanding

"Most of my life has been spent not understanding, and I can assure you, it was not easy." - Rilke

the grand american expression

"The English language befriends the grand American expression . . . . it is brawny enough and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of a race who through all change of circumstance was never without the idea of political liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has attracted the terms of daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. It is the powerful language of resistance . . . it is the dialect of common sense. It is the speech of the proud and and melancholy races and of all who aspire. It is the chosen tongue to express growth faith self-esteem freedom justice equality friendliness amplitude prudence decision and courage. It is the medium that shall well nigh express the inexpressable."

Walt Whitman, from the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass

"Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most needs poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. Nothing out of its place is good and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land . . . . he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking."

- Walt Whitman, from the preface to Leaves of Grass

to love another

"To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned. You just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your unbelief." - Anne Sexton

passionate tenacity

"The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, sea-faring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people.... The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else and is in the soul."

- Walt Whitman (from the preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855 ed.)

rilke in the afternoon

"And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything."
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

grammar, bitch

"Grammar in learning is like tyranny in government - confound the bitch I'll never be her slave."
— John Clare

dear mr. roethke

I thought about writing a good "public
poem," one for the eyes of all who read such shit
from my pen, but failed. Again. The words
were personal and scared me. I hid them—
forgive me. How about light verse?
The question never occurred to me before,
always making the longest fucking lines,
always imitating the poet I love best.
Are my own lines fair, Mr. Roethke? Fair
enough? Public consumption is not at high
demand these days. Not for my style—your style—
my poor imitations. Jesus, if only the weight
of your heavy lines didn't hang on me so
strongly. If my love of lineage wasn't
limitless. Dear God. Sacrilegious and pious,
my two best loves, in tandem, and now
the clean scent of my Papa's cologne. (I asked
for Old Spice, just to be like him.) I try
and make a good line, or two good lines,
a string of words pleasing to the ear—hell,
Papa, just one good phrase between
commas would suit me just fine, if only
for you to nod your approval, embrace me.

(rev. 4/30)

good things

"Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or another book; give it, give it all, give it now. the impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

Good advice for writing a book. Good words to live a life by. I hope.

rusty words

"And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long."
— Sylvia Plath

spring

When Spring comes, she comes.
She comes with joy. She carries
light in her hands, which is joy;
coming, going, growing
into Summer, with warmth, comes
on; and I think, if only I
could be that Godly man,
Hopkins; for one green moment.

a vulnerable mystic said

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among the mysteries."
— Theodore Roethke