Sometimes I wonder if I should only have written poems. Poetry was my first love, so to speak; it remains the bedrock of my writing and reading life, even my teaching life. But of course I’ve wandered astray, trying my hand at novels and biographies of Steinbeck,
Frost,
Faulkner,
Jesus, and
Gore Vidal – as well as books of essays on various subjects, including
Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America and
Why Poetry Matters, where I put down most of my basic thoughts on the art of poetry.
Now I’m bringing out a volume called
New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015. It contains roughly 70 pages of new work, written in the past decade, as well as most of the poems I have published in four volumes at intervals over four decades. In many ways it’s intimidating to look at such a collection – I sat with the galleys yesterday and read through it slowly – without a pang of nostalgia, as I remember so well the circumstances of each poem, and many of these mark difficult turns in my life. Poetry is, as much as anything, a means of counting the losses, although (for me) it’s also about celebration, about praise, about giving thanks.
A fair number of the poems in
Anthracite Country (1982), my first volume, were about my years of growing up in northeastern Pennsylvania. I was raised in Scranton, at the ragged western fringe of that forlorn city, near an abandoned culm dump – culm is the waste product of mining. These dumps heaped around my house, and they stank of sulfur, and they burned all night a kind of blue-vermillion. Some of the buildings nearby were long-abandoned breakers, where they used to grind the hard lumps of coal into various sizes. There were shut-up mines in the foothills only a few miles away, and I would once in a while climb into them, lower myself into the darkness, into the eerie damp.
I came from a family of Italian immigrants, and my grandfather and uncle had been miners. My Uncle Gene, in fact, was killed in the mines in 1966, on the day I graduated from high school. By rude coincidence, I was giving a talk at the graduation that evening about the history of mining in Lackawanna County, so it was disorienting to get the news of his death only a couple of hours before I had to go onstage to give that address.
Even today I recall the hot funeral home where my uncle was “shown” – it was a closed casket, as he had been crushed by the ceiling that gave way in the rogue mineshaft where he’d been working. (These shafts had supposedly been shut down because the pillars of coal that held up the ceilings had been robbed by greedy mining companies trying to cash in on what was left in the seam.) In “The Miner’s Wake,” I sketch the scene:
The small ones squirmed in suits and dresses,
wrapped their rosaries round the chair legs,
tapped the walls with squeaky shoes.
But their widowed mother, at thirty-four,
had mastered every pose of mourning,
plodding the sadness like an ox through mud.
Her mind ran well ahead of her heart,
making calculations of the years without him
that stretched before her like a humid summer.
The walnut coffin honeyed in sunlight;
calla lilies bloomed over silk and satin.
Nuns cried heaven into their hands
while I, a nephew with my lesser grief,
sat by a window, watching pigeons
settle onto slag like summer snow.
This poem was among the earliest that caught what I would consider my “mature” voice in poetry: a quietly musical poem, full of local imagery, with an autobiographical link. The lines have a four-beat rhythm – tetrameter. I liked working in these three-line stanzas, each encapsulating a phase in the unfolding narrative, all of which add up to what I was trying for: a deep image.
I still look back wistfully at some of the lines here, which I think worked well: “plodding the sadness like an ox through mud,” “nuns cried heaven into their hands,” “a nephew with my lesser grief.” I’d be happy, four decades later, to write as well again.
The poems of
Anthracite Country fell together easily, inhabiting a particular voice that enabled me to talk about my childhood, the imagery of mining country, my growing awareness of language itself as I moved through what I called in one poem my “seasons of the skin.” I wrote quite a number of love poems here, too: these reflected my experience of being a 20-something in search of erotic experience. Indeed, the earliest poem in the collection is actually one I wrote in 1973 while I was in graduate school in Scotland – I spent seven years there; this is “Amores (after Ovid),” and it’s a very loose adaptation of one of the great Latin poet’s most enchanting lyrics, from the
Ars Amatoria.
That poem, in fact, may be the first moment when I found myself able to write in a language entirely my own, although I was drawing on the Latin verse for a baseline. In my syntax and phrasing, I mimicked the style of my crucial mentor at the time,
Alastair Reid, a Scottish poet who became a close and lifelong friend. I brought a rough draft of the poem to him, and we sat together at his desk. I watched as he crossed out words, moved stanzas around, added the occasional word or phrase of his own. When he finished, he looked at me thoughtfully and said, a single word, “Good,” in his accent rhyming with “food.” I don’t think I ever again felt such relief – he could be very stern as a critic – or such gladness for a note of praise.
By the time I published this first collection – I don’t count a book of juvenilia published in Scotland in 1972 – I had already under my belt a critical book on the poetry of
Theodore Roethke, who was another major influence on my early writing. That book, in its original form, had been my doctoral thesis at St. Andrews, and I rewrote it during my first few years of teaching. I found it both exhilarating and informative to write criticism, especially of poetry. But I wondered if thinking about poems in prose got in the way of writing poems.
I doubt it did much harm, but it certainly slowed my progress as a poet. In retrospect, I think of my prose books as speed bumps: they kept me writing poems at a pace that one might called “stately.” I would have a tendency to write too much if left to my druthers, and this is probably bad for poets. I met the poet
Stanley Kunitz at about this time, in the mid-’70s, and he remarked that he had published a volume of poems about once in every decade, arguing that this pace allowed him to make sure that each poem in each volume was really an achieved thing, however small or incidental. He spoke dismissively of poets who churned out volumes every two or three years, saying he would wait for their
Selected Poems.
Novels certainly got in the way of poems, as they required massive quantities of time. I spent nearly five years trying to get my second novel,
The Patch Boys (1986), into shape, rewriting the whole thing in the first person after having finished a draft in the third person. This was a novel about my Italian family in coal mining country in the 1920s – the protagonist and speaker was a 15-year-old version of my father. In many ways it drew on the language and tone of
Anthracite Country.
I had moved to a small town in Vermont by the early ’80s, had married and fathered two sons. So the new poems I wrote reflected my new situations, and these appeared in
Town Life in 1988, only some four years after
Anthracite Country appeared. Those poems had a mildness and quietness that, for me, arose from my daily life, and I liked working in longer forms, often in blank verse, often reflecting the influence of a new mentor,
Robert Penn Warren, who lived not far away in West Wardsboro, Vermont. He was an old man by the time I met him, but he had come into his own as a poet, writing many of his best poems in the last decade of his life. (He died in 1989.)
Warren and I took long hikes in the Vermont woods, talking almost always about poetry: its traditions and difficulties, its odd place in a world where readers were far and few between. But his dedication to the craft, and his example – he had published 10 novels and a good deal of criticism as well as his many poems – stirred me, and I still like to gaze on a photograph of him that I took in 1985, and that hangs on the wall above my desk. He was a kind and gentle fellow, a natural teacher, and his interest in my poetry had meant a great deal. It still does.
I pushed through the ’90s with a few novels, including
The Last Station – about the final year in Tolstoy’s life – and another about Walter Benjamin’s tragic flight over the Pyrenees in 1940. I wrote a novel about Christopher Columbus that has, perhaps thankfully, disappeared from view. I also wrote biographies of Steinbeck and
Frost. That I managed to eke out a volume of poems in 1998 – a decade after
Town Life – seems hard to believe, but I did. It was
House of Days. A lot of these poems were about people and ideas, such as a longish one about my friendship with the Oxford philosopher,
Isaiah Berlin, whom I had known as a student and later, as a fellow at an Oxford college, gotten to know more intimately. Another poem in that volume, “Borges in Scotland,” is about an encounter with the great Argentine writer, whom I met through Alastair Reid in 1970. Perhaps not surprisingly, my biographical instincts were making themselves known in my poetry.
After 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, which I passionately opposed, I began writing a sequence of fiercely political poems. These angry poems appeared in
The Art of Subtraction in 2005. A few of these, such as a villanelle about 9/11 called “After the Terror,” seemed especially right, with my anger contained – or held under control – by the formal restraints of the verse form itself. Here is that poem:
Everything has changed, though nothing has.
They've changed the locks on almost every door,
and windows have been bolted just in case.
It's business as usual, someone says.
Is anybody left to mind the store?
Everything has changed, though nothing has.
The same old buildings huddle in the haze,
with faces at the windows, floor by floor,
the windows they have bolted just in case.
No cause for panic, they maintain, because
the streets go places they have been before.
Everything has changed, though nothing has.
We're still a country that is ruled by laws.
The system's working, and it's quite a bore
that windows have been bolted just in case.
Believe in victory and all that jazz.
Believe we're better off, that less is more.
Everything has changed, though nothing has.
The windows have been bolted just in case.
In the past decade, I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking and writing about religion, as in a biography of Jesus that I published in 2013. My reading in theology, and my religious practice – I’m an Anglican, and have been for 40 years, although I combine it with a strong interest in Buddhism and Hinduism, which seem like highly complementary forms of religious practice. This interest is not new: I was reading modern theology almost compulsively in my 20s, and I’ve never really lost interest in the subject. (At St. Andrews, in Scotland, I studied the New Testament carefully, having grown up in a conservative Baptist family.)
The new poems in my
New and Collected seem to draw on all the various strains in my earlier writing. Many of them build on the place-consciousness one saw in
Anthracite Country, and they could easily fit beside the poems in that volume. The mining country I knew as a child is front and center here. There are certainly poems about Vermont, about walking in the woods, that draw on my longtime interest in Emerson and Frost – in the tradition of Transcendentalist writing that remains dear to me. But there is a fresh awareness of mortality here, and many of the new poems explore my own brand of theological musing, as in “The Insomniac Thinks of God” –
Midwinter, after midnight:
coy-dogs shrill the bitter valley
as the owl, in moon-tones,
wonders who. Far off,
the lonely engine of a plane drones on.
It’s then I think of him
who, unlike me, is without boundaries,
who, unlike me, can hold his tongue.
He listens urgently,
whose wakeful ear outlasts the night.
I don’t know if I’d have been a better poet had I not spent so much time in the vineyards of prose, writing novels and biographies, essays and criticism. Examples are rare enough –
Thomas Hardy,
D. H. Lawrence,
Robert Graves,
Robert Penn Warren – of poets who have spent a fair portion of their life writing in genres other than poetry. I certainly had these particular writers in mind over the past four decades or more.
Then again, I doubt I could have done otherwise. The things we write are not so much consciously chosen as gratefully accepted. Over four or five decades, I’ve listened (reading poems, novels, essays, plays), trying to learn from those who went before me, trying to add something where I could – sometimes in prose, sometimes in poetry.