RUMINATION: Poetics, keeping in touch, & Norman Jordan
My friends and I rarely write letters these days, the kind you find tucked away in a book years later. I found one the other day, and it captured my imagination.
I’ll keep that one secret here, but that letter had to do with hospitals, life and death, families, friendship and gratitude. On reading the old letter, I experienced a marked, physical sensation in my head I cannot quite describe.
Emily Dickinson reserved the name poetry for only that which had such a powerful effect on her: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
These old letters in a sense become poetry sometimes, like Mom’s pressed wedding flowers found in a family picture album 60 years later.
It sometimes seems I live on e-mail, but there’s nothing like handwriting, nothing like paper, nothing like the personal touch. Why do we rely so much on e-mail and phone calls? Perhaps a lack of time.
I still hold dear a James Dean postcard a friend sent to me years ago when my life was breakng down. It is yellow now, but I remember when it was very new. I remember how much the personal note meant and means still.
I love Richard Hugo’s wonderful letter poems in his 1977 book “31 Letters and 13 Dreams” — how distinctive a voice! (Check out Hugo at Norton Poets Online.)
Most of the great poets wrote compelling letters.
William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky corresponded with each other from the late 1920s to about the time Williams died in 1963. Zukofsky died in 1978. Both poets, each sharp as a pin, remain important influences on poets around the world. It’s not as if their correspondence is ubiquitous. You have to look for it. The nearest library with a copy of their letters is Université Laval Bibliothèque, Quebec, Canada. Or you could order the book from Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Books-A-Million and such. It costs about $30 or $40.
The gist of my thoughts on this, even after a day at my day job:
First, “A Test of Poetry by Louis Zukofsky,” page 50, where he gave us a lasting workshop on how to read:
“The music of verse carries an emotional quality; when the music slackens, emotion dissipates, and the poetry is poor.”
The line is seared into my memory after I read it first about 40 years ago.
And there’s the strength of William Carlos Williams’ admonition:
“No ideas but in things.”
It was, wasn’t it, after all, sentimentality that got us into this war or that war; think about it…. nationalism is sentiment, and that’s a nice way of putting it.
Here’s a kind of love poem, for the love of truth, which is for many of us, our purpose:
Click this to hear Williams reading, linked from ubu.com, a great collection of sound.
The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
In the letters between Williams and Zukofsky, mixed with the ongoing, concise combing of their work, always are very human lines, … like this from a Dear Louis:
“It is a miserable day today. I have at the moment nothing to do but sit here typing this letter to you. When I see you we’ll find something to say about our lives. Love to Celia from us both. I presume Paul is growing up fast. My own grandchildren are going their various ways as children do, poor kids, if they can hook onto something as Paul has done to his fiddle they are lucky.
Best luck
Bill
***
Dear MountainWord friends: Have a great weekend. I must get up very early, and it’s getting very late. I think I’ll call my old friend Jack McCarthy out in California before I turn in.
Oh! Before I go, don’t forget Norman Jordan’s poetry workshop in Malden on Saturday, May 10. Only two of us showed up the last time, and I might not be able to make it this time, not that I wouldn’t want to. It is a great workshop. Click this to read previous posts about Norman here at MountainWord, so you can find the place if you decide to go. You won’t regret it.
