Rich & Auden
Re: Auden.
Post thêm bài của Rich, về bài thơ khủng khiếp của Auden
Trieu Duong "...mad Ireland
hurt you into poetry."
perhaps poor, broken and bloody Vietnam hurt many of us into it? Perhaps not !
perhaps poor, broken and bloody Vietnam hurt many of us into it? Perhaps not !
- ·
·
Quoc Tru Nguyen
Bài thơ khủng khiếp thật. Nó khai sinh ra nhà thơ Brodsky, khi, ở trong tù, ngộ
ra thơ, và thơ của mình sẽ làm. GCC cũng có kinh nghiệm này, khi nghe nhạc sến
“Ngày mai đi nhận xác chồng” ở Đỗ Hoà!
·
NOT HOW TO
WRITE POETRY, BUT WHEREFORE
"Masters". For
all the poetry I grew up with-the Blake, the Keats, the Swinburne and the Shelley,
the Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Whitman, the domesticated versions of
Dickinson-in my twenties a greater ocean fell open before me, with its
contradictory currents and undertows. Frost, Wylie, Millay seemed like
shoreline tidal pools: out beyond lay fogs, reefs, wrecks, floating corpses,
kelp forests, sargasso silences, moonlit swells, dolphins, pelicans, icebergs,
suckholes, hunting grounds. Young, hungry, I was searching, within the limits
of time and place and sex, for words to match and name desire.
Rilke's
poem, the antique marble torso of Apollo glinting at the passerby through its
pectorals like eyes, saying: “Du musst dein Leben iindern”, You have to change
your life. Finding J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender's translations of Rilke
in a bookstore in Harvard Square (at first, thinking this Rainer Maria might be
a woman). “Du musst dein Leben iindern”. No poem had ever said it quite so
directly. At twenty-two it called me out of a kind of sleepwalking. I knew, even
then, that for me poetry wasn't enough as something to be appreciated, finely
fingered: it could be a fierce, destabilizing force, a wave pulling you further
out than you thought you wanted to be.
You have to
change your life.
•
In his
editor's foreword to my first book of poems, published in 1951, W. H. Auden
praised my "talent for versification" and "craftsmanship,"
while explaining to and of my poetic generation:
Radical
changes and significant novelty in artistic style can only occur when there has
been a radical change in human sensibility to require them. The spectacular
events of the present time [did he mean the revelations of the Holocaust? the unleashing
of nuclear weapons? The dissolution of the old colonial empires?] must not
blind us to the fact that we are living not at the beginning but in the middle
of a historical epoch; they are not novel but repetitions on a vastly enlarged
scale and at a violently accelerated tempo of events which took place long
since.
Every poet
under fifty-five cherishes, I suspect, a secret grudge against Providence for
not getting him [sic] born earlier.'
If anything,
I cherished a secret grudge against Auden-not because he didn't proclaim me a
genius, but because he proclaimed so diminished a scope for poetry, including
mine. I had little use for his beginnings and middles. Yet he was one of the
masters. I had read his much-quoted lines:
... poetry
makes nothing happen; it survives
In the
valley of its saying where executives
Would never
want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches
of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns
that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of
happening, a mouth.'
Auden had
written that in January 1939, elegizing W. B. Yeats. He ended it with a charge
to living poets (or so I read it; maybe he was still talking to Yeats):
In the
nightmare of the dark
All the dogs
of Europe bark,
And the
living nations wait,
Each
sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual
disgrace
Stares from
every human face,
And the seas
of pity lie
Locked and
frozen in each eye.
Follow,
poet, follow right
To the
bottom of the night,
With your
unconstraining voice
Still
persuade us to rejoice.
With the
farming of a verse
Make a
vineyard of the curse,
Sing of
human unsuccess
In a rapture
of distress;
In the
deserts of the heart
Let the
healing fountain start,
In the
prison of his days
Teach the
free man how to praise."
But I was
growing up in a postwar world where executives were increasingly tampering with
everything, not least the valleys of saying. And in that world-or in the sector
of it I could perceive around me-both women and poetry were being
redomesticated .
•
“Masters”.
In my college years T. S. Eliot was the most talked-of poet. The Cocktail Party
played on Broadway at that time; his name and work were already part of student
conversations, alluded to in courses. I listened to lectures on The Waste Land,
the Four Quartets, earnestly taking notes, trying to grasp the greatness. I
came to Eliot's poetry with the zeal of a young neophyte discovering the new and
admired.
I came to it
also as a young person utterly disaffected from Christianity and from organized
religion in general. My experience of the suburban Protestant Church was that
it had nothing whatsoever to do with changing one's life. Its images and
rituals were wedded to a world I was trying to escape, the world of passionless
respectability. I wanted nothing more to do with it. But how could an eighteen-year-old
girl from Baltimore critique the fact that the greatest modern poet in English
(as everyone seemed to agree) was a High Church Anglican? In my lecture notes,
penciled on the endpapers of the copy of Four Quartets that I still have, I
find: "This = problem of a Christian poem in a secular age-you can't
accept it unless you accept Christian religion." The lecturer was F. O.
Matthiessen, one of Eliot's earliest interpreters, who one year later, in a
suicide note, described himself as a Christian and a socialist. He was also a homosexual.
My Jewish
father, calling himself a Deist, my Protestant-born mother, secular by default
(as, perhaps, married to a Christian, she'd have been Christian, without strong
convictions either way), had sent me to church for several years as a kind of
social validation, mainly as protection against anti-Semitism. I learned
nothing there about spiritual passion or social ethics. If the liturgy found
me, it was through the Book of Common Prayer, mostly the poetry of the King James
Bible contained in it. I used to walk home from church feeling that I must be
at fault: surely, if I were truly receptive, I would feel "something"
when the wafer was given, the chalice touched to my lips. What I felt was that
I was acting-we were all in a pageant or a play. Nor was this theater magical.
Christianity as thus enacted felt like a theological version of a social world
I already knew I had to leave. Sometimes, having to pull away from a world of
coldness, you end up feeling you yourself are cold. I wrote this disaffection
into an early poem, "Air without Incense."
Christianity
aside, there was for me a repulsive quality to Eliot's poetry: an aversion to
ordinary life and people. I couldn't have said that then. I tried for some time
to admire the structure, the learnedness, the cadences of the poems, but the
voice overall sounded dry and sad to me. Eliot was still alive, and I did not
know how much his poetry had been a struggle with self-hatred and breakdown;
nor was I particularly aware that his form of Christianity, like the religion I
had rejected, was aligned with a reactionary politics. He was supposed to be a
master, but, as the young woman I was, seeking possibilities-and
responsibilities-of existence in poetry, I felt he was useless for me.
•
What I
lacked was even the idea of a twentieth-century tradition of radical or
revolutionary poetics as a stream into which a young poet could dip her glass.
Among elders, William Carlos Williams wrote from the landscape of ordinary
urban, contemporary America, of ordinary poor and working people, and in a
diction of every-day speech, plainspoken yet astonishingly musical and
flexible. But I don't recall being taken out of my skin by any Williams poem,
though later I would work with his phrasing and ways of breaking a line as a
means of shedding formal metrics. Muriel Rukeyser, the most truly experimental
and integratedly political poet of her time, was unknown to me except by her
name in a list of former Yale Younger Poets. I don't recall the publication of
The Life of Poetry in 1949. No one-professor or fellow student-ever said to me
that this was a book I needed. And not even the name of Thomas McGrath, the great
midwestern working-class poet, was known to me. His chap books and small-press
editions were not published or discussed by critics in the East; he was himself
on the McCarthyite blacklist. Even the Left and Communist journals had trouble
with his poetry, finding it "difficult" and unorthodox." In
fact, I was to discover Rukeyser only in the late 1960s with the poetry readings
against the Vietnam War and, soon after, with the rising women's movement in
which she was, late in her life, a powerful voice. I did not read McGrath until
the 1980s, when his long historical and autobiographical "Letter to an
Imaginary Friend" became available in its entirety. But, in my early
twenties, was my life ready for Rukeyser and McGrath? Perhaps not. Yet each of
them was asking urgent questions about the place of poetry, questions I had as
yet no language for .
•
I was
exceptionally well grounded in formal technique, and I loved the craft. What I
was groping for was something larger, a sense of vocation, what it means to
live as a poet-not how to write poetry, but wherefore. In my early twenties I
took as guide a poet of extreme division, an insurance executive possessed by
the imagination. But if I was going to have to write myself out of my own
divisions, Wallace Stevens wasn't the worst choice I could have made.
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