Chancellor Conversations: Tracing the Lyric
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- Опубліковано 6 бер 2016
- At the 2015 Poets Forum, the Academy of American Poets annual poetry conference held in New York City, Chancellors Mark Doty, Linda Gregerson, and Jane Hirshfield sat down together to talk about the lyric poem.
Their conversation covers the deep history of the lyric poem, beginning with its possible origins and continuing through the golden age of the sonnet to the present day. Through their discussion, the lyric poem’s history comes alive; as Doty says, “the poet is present in 1856 and 2015. Present for the reader on West 13th Street and the reader in Reykjavik. The poem inscribes an attentive presence in the world, and its act of attention, once launched, does not stop until there are no more readers.”
Hirshfield says, “Writing a lyric, reading a lyric, makes us more capacious and subtle. They trick us into knowing more than we know, feeling more than we knew we felt.”
For more information about the Academy of American Poets, and poets such as Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, and Linda Gregerson, visit www.poets.org.
In that same book of essays, Brodsky writes an amazing explication of Maria Tsvetaeva's poem to Rilke upon hearing of his death. The essay is called "A Footnote to a Poem." She was planning to visit Rilke, but he died before she left. She writes a poem addressed to his dead spirit to complete the visit that she has been robbed of. Her face to face meeting with Rilke, who she had been corresponding with in several letters, is lost. So she writes her last "letter" to him as a poem because she is forced by grief to address him in the afterlife. Her poem is thus a bridge to the infinite. Shakespeare often speaks of defying death by creating the life of his beloved in his sonnets. In sonnet 76 he writes:
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.
Jane Hirshfield is amazing!
Of course Shakespeare is addressing his beloved when he says "O, know, sweet love, I always write of you." But if
Brodsky is right, Shakespeare is also addressing " Love " itself which is infinite, beyond our mortal limits. Shakespeare suggests that all of his writing is always about this infinite experience we call LOVE. Whenever it breaks into our mortal world, we want to reply, but the only way to reply to infinity is through prayer or poetry. Prayer or poetry is the language spoken by the infinite. Much sacred scripture, of course, is written in poetry because of this predicament. Ordinary speech cannot capture or render it. I suppose we must expand Brodsky's poetry as he does to all "art." Music, dance, theater, painting, architecture. And when we speak of a good artist...say a Rembrandt or a DaVinci, or Olivier, or Beethoven, or Nureyev, what we mean by "great or good art" is that we can hear or see the infinite through it. When we see a Rembrandt, somehow we see a soul, and that vision is very different than simply seeing a satisfactory portrait or likeness. We are not actually seeing a person, but the soul as well as the face as Maria insisted on speaking to Rilke's soul even after he died. And she could do that by creating a poem which could reach into another dimension beyond this world. William Blake calls this transformation of perception "cleansing the perception." For William Blake true perception is: To see a World in a Grain of Sand /And a Heaven in a Wild Flower /Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand /And Eternity in an hour. We live in this strange world today where the Mafia has brainwashed people into seeing people as "dirt" or "trash." They have reversed what Blake is describing, by leading people to reduce everything around them into less than the truth of its being. Poetry helps us to heal that terrible sickness, which was also prevalent in Blake's day in the slave trade which he eloquently spoke against in his poetry as well. Any real practice of religion or communication with the infinite blasts away the reductive vision of the criminal. If art or religion does not expand our perception, than I think we have to question whether or not it is sincere or merely a social gathering or an institution promoting its own mechanical life. Most people know bad music or bad art or bad poetry when they hear or see it. We need also to teach people how to recognize bad religion or "false" religion in all those religious groups who diminish our perception of other people much less our perception of our physical world. Brodsky lived in the midst of this sacrilegious world growing up under Stalin in Soviet Russia. He was particularly sensitive to this reductive way of life. He says that his entire generation lived inside their books in that terrible time because only there was life as it should be. I pray that we listen to someone like Brodsky who learned to expand his vision through art and poetry to keep his soul and the souls of those around him alive. Brodsky helps me to understand as a professor of poetry why this criminal system is so impossible for me to adjust to or ask my students or friends or family to accept. Acceptance is impossible for poetry or poets or any true artist.
Wow, you nailed it right on the head! And it's sad to see so many educated individuals who cannot see it! Or just refuse to see it.
"what is a poem, but an amplification of our powers" - I can dig that!
I don't know why, but I hear Joseph Brodsky saying in his essay "In the Shadow of Dante" in Less than One, "Love is the attitude of the infinite towards the finite. Our response is either prayer or poetry." Brodsky insists that the lyric is a response to the love of the infinite for us finite creatures. So we have to make a bridge between the finite and the infinite. A poem acknowledges that the infinite has entered our lives and we want to reply to "it." Brodsky also says in that same essay that poetry does not imitate life, "If art does anything of this kind, it undertakes to reflect those few elements of existence which transcend "life," extend it beyond its terminal point...an undertaking which is frequently mistaken for art's or the artist's own groping for immortality. In other words art imitates death rather than life....After all, what distinguishes art from life is the ability of the former to produce a higher degree of lyricism than is possible in any human interplay. Hence poetry's affinity with...if not the very invention of....the notion of afterlife."