Ambition and survival : becoming a poet

302 Pages·2007·2.03 MB·English

by  Wiman

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Contents
Title Page
Note to the Reader
Preface
I
1. On Being Nowhere
2. Milton in Guatemala
3. Filthy Lucre
4. A Mile from Hell
5. The Limit
II
1. A Piece of Prose
2. Finishes: On Ambition and Survival
3. An Idea of Order
4. Fourteen Fragments in Lieu of a Review
5. Poetry in a Visual Culture
6. In Praise of Rareness
7. In the Flux That Abolishes Me
III
1. Fugitive Pieces (I)
2. Fugitive Pieces (II)
3. Notes on Poetry and Religion
IV
1. The Druid Stone: Thomas Hardy
2. A New Mode of Damnation?: Hart Crane
3. Pure Honey, Pure Gall: Edna St. Vincent Millay
4. Eight Takes
5. So Fierce and Sweet the Song: George Mackay Brown
6. The Created and the Made: Janet Lewis and the Uses of Convention
7. Free of Our Humbug: Basil Bunting
V
1. Love Bade Me Welcome
Notes
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
Preface
W
hen I was twenty years old I set out to be a poet. That sounds like
I was a sort of frigate raising anchor, and in a way I guess I was,
though susceptible to the lightest of winds. When a visiting poet at the
college I attended said offhandedly that he thought young poets should
travel rather than go to graduate school, I spent four years dragging my
big ambitions and bigger ignorance from one impermeable place to
another. When I read Samuel Johnson’s comment that any young man
could compensate for his poor education by reading five hours a day for
five years, that’s exactly what I tried to do, practically setting a timer
every afternoon to let me know when the little egg of my brain was
boiled. It’s a small miracle that I didn’t take to wearing a cape.
I regret none of it, or at least not the iron aim of it. There are always
casualties of mastering passions, casualties deep within oneself if not of
others (though all too often of others, too). These one does regret—or,
hopefully, grieve—a topic that some of these essays explore. But the
ambition and fierce focus, the hunger of it, the sense of a life shaped by
some strong inner imperative: all of this—even the moments easy to
mock, even the years when I wrote only bad poems, or no poems—I find
myself cherishing. I still believe that a life in poetry demands absolutely
everything—including, it has turned out for me, the belief that a life in
poetry demands absolutely everything.
This book is a record of that belief, and shaped by its evolutions and
confusions just as surely as I am. The oldest essay here is “Finishes: On
Ambition and Survival,” which I wrote twelve years ago when I was just
beginning to have some conscious sense of the tension between life and
death that can be played out within a single poem. The most recent essay
is “Love Bade Me Welcome,” in which issues of life and death are
considerably more literal and personal. The essays could not be more
different, but they are so intimately related that I think of them as parts of
a single work. Indeed, I have had this book in mind for so long, have for
so many years meant it to be a book rather than simply a collection of
miscellaneous prose pieces, that I am relieved now not to have published
a selection of exclusively critical work or woven the personal pieces into
a memoir, both of which I have been on the verge of doing at one time or
another.
I don’t mean to suggest that there is no difference between critical and
personal writing. There certainly is, and I have tried in my critical
writings to get at truths that transcend my own creative urges and
anxieties. But I do believe that a reader should feel the pressure of the
personal even in essays from which an author is scrupulously absent. A
critic for whom literature is not rooted deeply in life, whose ideas seem
to have no relation to lived experience, doesn’t hold much interest for
me. By the same token, any writing that is merely personal, that does not
manage to say something critical about life in general, is equally inert.
Our own experiences matter only insofar as they reveal something of
experience itself. They are often the clearest lens that we can find, but
they are a lens.
In 2003 I took over the editorship of Poetry magazine. It’s taken some
getting used to. Not only had I grown accustomed to constant itinerancy
and gentle poverty, but I had just begun to accept the fact that the only
responses I would get to even the most flagrant things I said about poetry
would be either absolute silence or some lone gleeful approval scrawled