Sunday, September 16. 2007
James Wright, "On Having My Pocket Picked In Rome"
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
Reading this, I realized that Wright’s (extensive) influence on my own work was the worst thing that could have happened to me as a poet. It stopped me dead for years. I’m 56 years old & just now beginning to recover from Wright’s abject, self-congratulatory sentimentality. I am having to reinvent sincerity from scratch. I blame James Wright for the wasted years.
You sound bitter, Joe. I have often tried to make a clean break from past influences - but am now looking more seriously at the idea of culmination, cultivation, and development than some ideal notion of cutting free & becoming (suddenly) more original. So, I would suggest that maybe you don’t have to reinvent sincerity from scratch - but that your Wright-like days might be an evolutionary stage, rather than some "wasted" period. There are tactical elements (cadence, tone) independent of subject or voice ("abject, self-congratulatory sentimentality") and the tactics that work seem to get under my skin if I read and re-read them long enough. So, the question for me has become not as much how to undo the damage as focus that rich source of raw energy in a direction I like.
A lot of fine poetry has been wrung from bitterness, Robert. I still have hope.
Robert, I think the poem of Wright’s you quote is just awful, the poet parodying his earlier voice without realizing it: "Therefore the hands grow cool and touch me lightly." Wright was very important to me as a young man. I liked his detached way of observing his own alienation. But as he aged — though there are exceptional poems — "he became his admirers," as Auden said of Yeats in another context. That is, he came to admire his own stance toward the world & that is poison to a poet. I’ve been reading Zbigniew Herbert recently & though I only have translations, I think Herbert & Wright are similar in many ways. Both are personal / political poets. Herbert never loses his skepticism about his own point of view. And that is the mature Wright’s main failure. That he comes to believe in his own voice.
To each his own, Joe. Perhaps I haven’t read enough Wright to consider this voice somehow a caricature of itself. I just look at it as a set piece and find the metaphor sufficiently interesting to carry it along. I suppose I wasn’t really thinking of Wright at all in the piece - just the recounting of an experience in somewhat Kafkaesque terms, which necessarily demands an authoritative presentation. No room for examining one’s own voice in such a tidy little vignette.
It seems to me, if I’m reading you right, that you detect in Wright’s poems certain aspects of his consciousness - and which you recognize in your former self - which you dislike. I can’t revise Wright’s life for him, but I do detect, articulate, and hopefully will one day appropriate certain tactical elements of his poems as valid and useful.
I am not sure if writing is a means to greater self-realization. I know other ways that work. And I know writing is a reflection of consciousness, so examining oneself carefully can lead to better writing. I just don’t know if the act of writing in itself can be expected to transform us. I have yet to write myself better - though, undoubtedly, it has helped. So, I work on my life and work on my writing. Which, on the writing side, means gleaning whatever I can from whomever I can.
It seems to me, if I’m reading you right, that you detect in Wright’s poems certain aspects of his consciousness - and which you recognize in your former self - which you dislike. I can’t revise Wright’s life for him, but I do detect, articulate, and hopefully will one day appropriate certain tactical elements of his poems as valid and useful.
I am not sure if writing is a means to greater self-realization. I know other ways that work. And I know writing is a reflection of consciousness, so examining oneself carefully can lead to better writing. I just don’t know if the act of writing in itself can be expected to transform us. I have yet to write myself better - though, undoubtedly, it has helped. So, I work on my life and work on my writing. Which, on the writing side, means gleaning whatever I can from whomever I can.
I’m not sure either whether writing has anything to do with self-actualization. I’m not actually sure what self-actualization means. I think Wright maybe began as a hard-nosed existentialist with a communist (small c) social conscience, who got suckered by the idea of writing as self-actualization. See Wright’s poems, "The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio," "Hook," & "Ars Poetica: Some Recent Criticism." I like the poems from Two Citizens, a book Wright came to regret as he slid into his decline, embarrassed perhaps by his own earlier social engagement. Maybe it’s just that he became middle-class & like so many folks from the working-class who rise in the world came to see his earlier engagements as suspect.
Note: I’ve shifted this comment out to the left margin because it seems to introduce a new movement in the discussion & because we might have indented ourselves into invisibility like the mouse’s tail / tale in Alice in Wonderland.
Note: I’ve shifted this comment out to the left margin because it seems to introduce a new movement in the discussion & because we might have indented ourselves into invisibility like the mouse’s tail / tale in Alice in Wonderland.
Thanks for saving us from marginalization, Joe. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
I don’t know about the specific movement away from being a working-class existential communist, but I can certainly relate to the Auden quote about Yeats. Like Auden, the grief comes from caring so much for what’s at stake; I have been most disappointed in the later work of certain poets whose early work I still admire greatly. Two that come immediately to mind are Galway Kinnell and (though it pains me even to say it) Li-Young Lee. Their most recent books wax philosophical in a somewhat generic fashion, as if all the complexity and careful choice has been loosened and distilled down into the quaint homilies their audiences crave. They’re not bad books. But compared to the earlier stuff, they come up short.
I think so much of it comes from poets now assuming the roles formerly held by priests, or philosophical teachers in ancient times. It is when poets begin to accept this task of teaching other humans about their humanity — instead of focusing on what makes for solid poetry — that, as another poet-friend also named Joe once put it, they "go soft." Fortunately, I don’t have enough admirers to metamorphose into any of them — but I am acutely aware of this phenomenon, since I find it so upsetting to see so many great poets turn into mediocre philosophers in the twilight of their careers.
I don’t know about the specific movement away from being a working-class existential communist, but I can certainly relate to the Auden quote about Yeats. Like Auden, the grief comes from caring so much for what’s at stake; I have been most disappointed in the later work of certain poets whose early work I still admire greatly. Two that come immediately to mind are Galway Kinnell and (though it pains me even to say it) Li-Young Lee. Their most recent books wax philosophical in a somewhat generic fashion, as if all the complexity and careful choice has been loosened and distilled down into the quaint homilies their audiences crave. They’re not bad books. But compared to the earlier stuff, they come up short.
I think so much of it comes from poets now assuming the roles formerly held by priests, or philosophical teachers in ancient times. It is when poets begin to accept this task of teaching other humans about their humanity — instead of focusing on what makes for solid poetry — that, as another poet-friend also named Joe once put it, they "go soft." Fortunately, I don’t have enough admirers to metamorphose into any of them — but I am acutely aware of this phenomenon, since I find it so upsetting to see so many great poets turn into mediocre philosophers in the twilight of their careers.
A poet who got good young & then stayed good is Hayden Carruth. His mature work is … mature.
