Poems That Reward a Second or Third or Ninety-fifth Reading
Harold Bloom, whom I cite almost reflexively when writing about poetry, counseled memorization “as a first crux in how to read poems.”
Once a staple of good teaching, memorization was abused into repeating by rote, and so was abandoned, wrongly. Silent intensive readings of a shorter poem that truly finds you should be followed by recitations to yourself, until you discover that you are in possession of the poem.
This advice crops ups in any number of Bloom’s essays and books. I take it here from the chapter “Poems” in his book How to Read and Why. Bloom had from an early age a gift for memorization of poems that I envy. “As a boy of eight,” he wrote, “I would walk about chanting Housman’s and William Blake’s lyrics to myself, and I still do, less frequently yet with undiminished fervor.”
The few short poems and passages from longer poems I have committed to memory at Bloom’s impetus are recited with perhaps comparable fervor and certainly with pleasure during strolls about the city, along the river, through a park, and often while standing at the window looking out on my neighborhood as shadows lengthen at day’s end. The Housman poem Bloom referred to, the fortieth lyric of A Shropshire Lad (1896), is one of them:
Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
Poets do not always speak to us on the initial encounter. Sometimes we are fortunate and something brings us back to a poet who put us off in the early stages, as happened for me with Wordsworth, who through my twenties and well into my thirties I found pedestrian and tedious, an exemplar of poetry I did not care for. I owe my midlife reckoning with him in part to Harold Bloom, who is one of our great critics of the English Romantics. Turning again to Bloom:
The poet Shelley, who was in some respects Wordsworth’s involuntary disciple, once defined the poetic Sublime as an experience that persuaded readers to give up easier pleasures for more difficult pleasures…”The Sublime” as a literary notion, originally meant “lofty,” in an Alexandrian treatise on style, supposedly composed by the critic Longinus. Later, in the eighteenth century, the Sublime began to mean a visible loftiness in nature and art alike, with aspects of power, freedom, wildness, intensity, and the possibility of terror.
In her book Break, Blow, Burn, Bloom’s pupil Camille Paglia provides close readings of forty-three poems by a diverse collection of poets, ranging from usual suspects in the canon, e.g., Shakespeare, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, to Gary Snyder, Wanda Coleman, and Joni Mitchell. Paglia holds that “close reading, or what used to be called ‘explication of text,’ not only is the best technique for revealing beauty and meaning in literature but is a superb instrument for the analysis of all art and culture.” Bloom and other critics also advocate close reading. I would not argue with them. However, this has never been how I go at it, perhaps my loss. Explication such as it is comes through repeated rereading when a poem finds me, when something in it persuades me to give up an easier pleasure for the more difficult one. I just read. Contemplation comes later when a poem stirs it up in me and I find aspects of it that were not evident on earlier readings.
The poetic traditions my poems draw from and my reading returns to begin these days with the English High Romantics, foremost Keats and Wordsworth, the sui generis William Blake, and sometimes Shelly and Byron. Keats wrote memorably in “Ode to Psyche,” “I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired.” I read in something of the same spirit.
Early on I was drawn to poets of the Surrealist Movement and the American Beats. André Breton’s surrealist manifestoes and the poets Paul Eluard and Robert Desnos stand out among the surrealists, as Gregory Corso does among the Beats, along with Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Bob Kaufman.
Philip Lamantia “both in his person and in his poetry, bridged the gap between European Surrealism and the radical American cultural revolution begun by the Beats” (Ferlinghetti, foreword to Lamantia, Collected Poems). In 1944 at the age of sixteen Lamantia left high school in San Francisco to join the Parisian surrealists in exile in New York during World War II. A year earlier Breton had accepted three poems submitted by Lamantia for publication in VVV and praised him as “a voice that rises once in a hundred years.”
Who else? Well of course the two great American poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and the sublime Emily Brontë. There are many others I return to and read with pleasure. The Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Négritude poets Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, and Chinese poets Han-shan, Wang Wei, and Du Fu come to mind as I think about it at this moment. And Rimbaud. How could I leave out Rimbaud?
You may notice the absence of contemporary poets from this tentative list. Among the blessings and curses of the internet is the accessibility of more poetry to more people than could have been imagined when I was scavenging the back basement of McKissick Memorial Library at the University of South Carolina and the shelves of Joyful Alternative, a prototypical bookstore/head shop of the day, when I was in college in the early 1970s. Too much. Who can possibly know where to start much less take it all in? In the meantime I am still trying to plug gaps in my education in an English tradition I largely neglected when I was younger and more taken with European poets on the continent. Of what I happen on here and there today, much of it comes via features on NPR or reviews in The New York Review of Books. Not much of that truly finds me.
Back when I was going regularly to poetry readings here in Portland, I met a number of fine poets with distinctive voices who in their various ways represent modes in a contemporary vein. I hesitate to name names because I am sure to leave out people who deserve mention and do not want anyone to feel slighted. For any omissions I apologize up front.
Among those who stand out are Wade Dinius, for his poems and for his translations of classical Chinese poets, Doug Spangle, Curtis Whitecarroll (now Sophia Helstrom-White), Lisa Wible Turowski, Emily Riley, Ric Vrana, Dennis McBride, Tommy Gaffney. Going back further to the Little 5 Points days, there was what I think of as the Chuck Oliveros circle—maybe I should think of it as the pterodactyl circle after his signature poem "The Pterodactyl in the Wilderness”—Diane Kistner, Harry Katz, Julie Shavin, who were part of a wild scene that included Rönnog Seaberg, Debbie Hiers, GCC, Elaine Falone, among others whose poems and presence were vibes in the air that nurtured my poems even as I walked where my own nature would be leading, as Emily Brontë put it. Somehow these remarkable poets accepted me into their midst at various times and places. For this I feel fortunate and grateful.
There will never be time enough in this life to read everything I would like to read even if I were to go cold turkey today on the mysteries I read for diversion, at present, Athenian Blues by Pol Koutsakis, about an Athens hit man who only accepts contracts on people who deserve their fate. His best friends from childhood are a high-class transgender sex worker, a homicide cop, and the woman who is the love of his and the cop’s life. She loves them both while in love with her husband who is confined to a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis. Ah, but I digress.
Poetry does not make us better people. Much fine poetry has been written by people whose character was not of the highest order. Gregory Corso stands as a textbook example. Corso once cleaned out Allen Ginsberg’s apartment in New York, where he had been living while Ginsberg was in California, and sold his friend’s possessions because he needed money to split for Europe. Ginsberg understood.
Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes. The Romantics understood this as the proper work of poetry: to startle us out of our sleep of death into a more capacious sense of life. There is no better motive for reading and rereading the best of our poetry. (How to Read)
Much rests, I think, with the cultivation of a certain sensibility that comes with a love of reading that takes one all over the place. We will not be taken with everything we encounter. On matters of poetry and art I hold firm to the conviction that not everything is for everyone. We do not all have to like or be moved by the same poems, paintings, films. I can recognize the importance of T.S. Eliot while not caring for his poems or his critical stance. That too is okay. Not everything we like will be the best, but even lesser poems can be read with a pleasure that leads us on to greater poems and pleasures.
It is worth remembering too that not everything written by even the greatest poets is at a high level. Bloom credits Wordsworth as “the true inventor of modern poetry” (How to Read). “Before Wordsworth, poetry had a subject. After Wordsworth, its prevalent subject was the poet’s own subjectivity” (The Best Poems of the English Language). Yet he also notes that almost all of Wordsworth’s poems worth reading were written by 1807, when he was just thirty-seven. “Wordsworth lived another forty-three years, and wrote very bad poetry indeed, by the ream. His superb originality, and his subsequent decline, between them set the parameters for modern poetry.”
I close with a passage and a poem that I carry with me in memory. The passage is from John Keats’s “Endymion,” a mess of a poem considered a failure even by the poet. I may have made it through to the end once long ago. It was a slog. The first two stanzas, thirty-three lines, though, are something else. They find me. The poem begins with a line I recall encountering with little effect in high school: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” A decade or two later I came to it again. The key parts go like this, first with lines eight through thirteen:
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits.
And on to the end of the second stanza:
…so does the moon, The passion poesy, glories infinite, Haunt us till they become a cheering light Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast, That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast, They alway must be with us, or we die.
The poem is by Emily Dickinson. She may well be, as Bloom says, our most cognitively difficult poet, and not just because of her idiosyncratic capitalization and punctuation. I cannot improve on Bloom’s admission about his own encounter with Dickinson: “Though I read and teach her constantly, I remain a bewildered idolator, struggling to understand her enigmatic sublimities” (The Best Poems). I cannot tell you what this poem means. That does not matter. I recognize that “certain Slant of light.”
There's a certain Slant of light, Winter afternoons— That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes— Heavenly Hurt, it gives us— We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the Meanings, are— None may teach it—Any— 'Tis the Seal Despair— An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air— When it comes, the Landscape listens— Shadows—hold their breath— When it goes, 'tis like the Distance On the look of Death—
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt
References and Related Reading
Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why, Scribner, 2000
Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost, HarperCollins, 2004
Garrett Caples, Philip Lamantia and Andre Breton, Dickinson Electronic Archives, February-April 2004
Philip Lamantia, The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia, ed. by Garrett Caples, Andrew Joron, Nancy Joyce Peters, foreword by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, University of California Press, 2013
Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn, Pantheon Books, 2005