Eavan Boland: The Creative Writing Department is having a party later tonight.
Toby [Tobias Wolff] has
arranged everyone to bring a short story to read like Hemingway's "Six Words".
It could be boring but we're going to have lots of fun.
Q: What are the six words?
Eavan: Hemingway's six words fiction story: "For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn."
[Wired magazine (Issue 14.11, November 2006) mentions that Hemingway considered
it as his best work.] If any of you want to come and try your hand, you're welcome.
[It didn't occur to me how poignant Hemingway's very short story was until hours later.
I thought a mother bought lots of new shoes for her baby who has outgrown them. So she's
having a garage sale of the never worn baby shoes. A woman friend told me "It's a great
story. The baby was stillborn. The expectant mother is now selling her shoes. How sad!"
It hit me like a ton of brick. Hurray for Hemingway— he nailed the short story
succintly in six words! Then I recalled Eavan Boland's 13th Annual Jonathan King Lecture
"The Science of Curing & The Art of Healing: A Poet's Experience" (Feb. 11, 2004) that I attended.
Eavan spoke about the healing process of parents who had lost a baby that was stillborn
in an Irish hospital. She wrote a poem "Tree of Life" for the
National Maternity Hospital remembrance service in November 1994.
I was so touched by Eavan's poem that right after her lecture, I went to Green Library
and found the poem in her book The Lost Land (1998), and composed a
web page of Eavan's talk
typing this poem and her Q&A session.]
Q: Have you been influenced by Bly's poetry?
Eavan: No! I'm from Ireland. I admire what Bly has accomplished.
Bly's Poetry Reading
left me breathless as many others in the audience. Bly's Colloquium
was also illuminating on the process of translation. However I don't buy into his
importing of Sufi and Zen into the mainstream of American poetry. We have a tradition
here of Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop. He was much too harsh on them
in his polemic essay
"A Wrong Turning
in American Poetry" (1963). He's correct on some points but wrong on the total picture.
Bly favors the unconscious in poetry and feels that the
Spanish and Latin American poets tap into that source more than American poets who are
too intellectual. Bly is from the philosophical school of poetry with Sufi and Zen influence.
I'm from the Line-Editing school emphasizing on craft and revision of one's manuscript.
When I see a mistake in a poem, it's like a scorpion has invaded the text, and
everything is ruined!
Student: Bly read to the class a lot of Mirabai and the Sufi poets. I regard them
as gurus for their spiritual wisdom. But their poems are not a play with language which
I like in poetry.
Eavan: What is a guru?
Student: A kind of spiritual mentor. [I kept silent and should have spoken up.
The Sanskrit word for guru may be separated into gu (darkness) and
ru (light). So a guru is someone who leads us from darkness to light or
from ignorance to knowledge. A guru guides the student to enlightenment.]
Eavan: The English Department invited Bly for dinner with the Stegner Fellows and
the Jones Lecturers. Bly talked about T.S. Eliot in a very affectionate way. He and Donald
Hall both read Eliot avidly when they were at Harvard [1948-1950]. When Bly asked the Stegner Fellows
about their readings of Eliot, few of them did so. I would say Eliot's chief failure was
not recognizing the form in poetry. We usually assign a Stegner Fellow to cater to the
Mohr Visiting Poet. Sometimes it could be quite intimidating for young poets at the
beginning of their career to be with an accomplished senior poet. We assigned
Michael McGriff
to Bly this semester. Mike has recently translated Tomas Tranströmer's
The Sorrow Gondola and showed them to Bly who is a good friend of
Tranströmer and his most ardent translator. Mike told me about his
experience saying "Bly would look at my work and say 'You did better than me
on that one. But I did better in this one than you!' We had such a good time
together!"
Eavan: I went with Bly to Marin one Sunday [May 18, 2008, San Rafael] for a
Poetry Reading [Jane Hirshfield was the third reader].
Bly wanted local Iranian musicians in Marin to play native instruments during our
poetry reading. I was not interested in having music playing while reading my poems.
Bly insisted on inviting Iranian musicians on stage. When we got there, it was total
chaos. Some musicians came up to me and said "Are you the organizer? The mike is not
working. You got to fix it!" I told him that I'm one of the poets doing the reading,
not the technician to fix the mike." I saw the disaster unfolding right before me.
But somehow Bly got everything in order. When he read the Hafez poems from his latest
book, the Iranian musicians played along during his reading. Then they chanted
the Hafez verses in Farsi and got the whole audience caught up with the
fervor of music, poetry, and singing. It was an incredible and inspiring
evening. The whole event was awesome and a total success. Only Bly could have pulled it off!
Eavan: Bly loves to do poetry readings. He makes a living doing it. Then we
have poets who don't like to be on stage and in the spotlight. We're going to have
Brigit Pegeen Kelly coming to read at
Stanford in the Lane Lecture Series. She's compulsively shy. At the Breadloaf Conference,
she read two of her poems and then Wallace Stevens poems. I told her "If I wish to
hear poems by Wallace Stevens, I could read his books. I want to hear your poems."
She's a product-based poet. Bly is process-based. Brigitte won the
Yale Series
of Younger Poets Competition [1986] with To the Place of Trumpets. She followed
that with Song [1995] and The Orchard [2004]. Terrific pieces of work.
The Jones Lecturers here at Stanford have curtailed process poetry in favor of
product poetry as they need to get their works published in their allotted time here.
Eavan: What is the distance in writing poetry and being a poet?
If someone tells me "I am a poet." I 'll believe them. I don't have
to see their poems. Be the thing rather than write the thing.
Bly is the thing. One needs to be persuasive in his belief.
Not necessary to convert everyone to spirituality. I ran
a community poetry workshop once. The writers mixed up
similes with metaphors. One woman from Ireland wrote in
her poem "limping spires" and I objected strongly to her
words, saying "spires in a church are straight, they just
don't limp. Get rid of that image." Another writer in the group
defended her image: "I'm from her town. I know the church she's
talking about— one spire is shorter than the other and is limping!"
Eavan: Dylan Thomas's
"Fern Hill"
[Analysis]
breaks every rule in the book about poetry. [PYC: Curiosly, my freshman
English teacher Kenneth Koch at Columbia Engineering made the class memorize this poem in 1959.
It was the hardest assignment that semester, more so than any chemistry or physics problem set.
Koch never told the class that he's a poet, and we were so lucky in having him teach us.]
When I see an advance student poet make a mistake in their writing, it breaks my heart.
Usually, it's a reflexive mistake. I'm ruthless and correct them on the spot. They should
not be making those kind of errors at their stage of writing. Bly would say that the problem
is not "limping spires" but that people are not imagining well enough in their poems.
I don't buy Bly's idea of writing from the unconscious and letting dream images
in without revision. You need craft— and the only way to improve is to write
the poem over and over again!
Eavan: Robert Lowell's poem "The Drinker" ends with images of parking meter
violations which conjures up man-made time juxtaposed with seasonal time.
["Is he killing time? Out on the street,
Two cops on horseback clop through the April rain
To check the parking meter violations
Their oilskins yellow as forsythia."
(Analysis)
[Lowell sent his poem to Elizabeth Bishop (1960)
which inspired her to write
"The Prodigal".]
Eavan: Robert Hass told me that when he went to a Robert Bly reading
for the first time, Bly read for four hours. He just loves doing it! Bly
and Gary Snyder went to Texas for a poetry reading. He tried to invite
Gary to his "Great Mother" Conference, but Snyder wouldn't go. I wouldn't
go either! You know at the Conference they wake up the attendees in the
middle of the night so they could share their dreams. Certainly I could do
without that! I think Bly's wife Ruth goes around to wake other people up.
They're such a sweet couple. Bly gave me this pendant before he left and
I'm wearing this necklace now, nice thoughtful gift from him. [I didn't tell
Eavan that she's wearing an amulet, one probably blessed by some Native
American shaman or a Sufi master friend of Bly.]
Q: What would you advise us as poets?
Eavan: Read different poets. Elizabeth Bishop has a bright tone and
a dark voice. Her poem "In the Waiting Room" is dark in tone. She's using
vernacular to push her dark agenda. It's a radical poem. You must listen
with an open mind to the left and right of the poetic spectrum.
Eavan: Judith Wright [1915-2000]
was an Australian poet, who became an environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights.
Her political poems were weaker than her earlier work. In her poem
"Australian 1970"
she made a crucial mistake in the third stanza. The words "suicide stain" was a blemish
on her whole poem.
[PYC: I was curious about the fatal flaw in Wright's poem that
after class I did a Google Search ("Judith Wright +"Australian 1970"). The only
hit was her obituary in the Guardian (June 29, 2000) that cited a stanza
from this poem. Stanford Library does not have a copy of her book
Shadow (1970) where this poem first appeared. I did locate a copy of
Judith Wright's Collected Poems: 1942-1970 (PR6045.R44A6.1971) and
found the poem on page 292 which I've typed below:
AUSTRALIA 1970
Die, wild country, like the eaglehawk,
dangerous till the last breath's gone,
clawing and striking. Die
cursing your captor through a raging eye.
Die like the tigersnake
that hisses such pure hatred from its pain
as fills the killer's dreams
with fear like suicide's invading stain.
Suffer, wild country, like the ironwood
that gaps the dozer-blade.
I see your living soil ebb with the tree
to naked poverty.
Die like the soldier-ant
mindless and faithful to your million years.
Though we corrupt you with our torturing mind,
stay obstinate; stay blind.
For we are conquerors and self-poisoners
more than scorpion or snake
and dying of the venoms that we make
even while you die of us.
I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust,
the drying creek, the furious animal,
that they oppose us still;
that we are ruined by the thing we kill.
— Judith Wright
After typing this poem from Wright's book, I realized that the words
"suicide's invading stain" occurs in the second stanza and the title
of the poem is "Australia 1970" instead of "Australian 1970". Eavan
Boland honors this poem of Judith Wright by including it in the book
she edited with Mark Strand, The Making of A Poem (A Norton
Anthology of Poetic Forms) (2000). It is in the section on
"The Ode" along with such classics as Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind",
and Keats' "To Autumn". Reading Wright's poem, one feels her strong
voice of concern of man's insensitivity to wildlife. However, I agree
with Eavan that the words "suicide's invading stain" sounds a bit
jarring in an otherwise strong poem of protest on our neglect of ecology.]
Eavan Boland asked the students why did they enroll in Bly's class,
what did they learn from him, and had us read our poems written this semester.
Students told Eavan that Bly would spend the first hour reading poems
to us from poets he translated (Kabir, Mirabai, Hafez) as well as his
own. Then he would give us a 15-20 minutes writing exercise based on
the form he read to us. We did exercises on prose poems (writing about
an object), ramage (8-lines verse focusing on a vowel or consonant),
ghazal (6 stanzas of 36 syllables with different themes in each stanza;
ending each stanza with the same word if we could do it). Sometimes Bly
would give us the first line from a poem from Kabir and Mirabai, and we
would take off from there in the class exercise. One student
said Bly called us "Loonies, I'll miss you" in the last class, "But he
said it in such an affectionate way. He really cared for us all." Another
said "During the break in our first class, Bly told us to go outdoors
and write some haikus like Basho and Issa. We were looking out to the Quad's Oval,
then we noticed Bly was out there too. He had his head white hair and all staring
into the grass. We thought he looked like an ostrich! It was such a privilege
to have such a famous poet with us this semester." One girl mentioned that
she doesn't usually read spiritual poetry so it was great that Bly shared
with the class some of the mystical poets like Kabir and Mirabai. Another
student said he enrolled in the class because he enjoyed Bly's translations
of poets like Rilke, Hauge, and Machado in The Winged Energy of Delight (2004).
PYC: I never wrote a prose poem before so it was a challenge to focus
on an object in writing "Deodar Cedar Rosebud".
After Bly's Colloquium, I told him about reading his Paris Review 2000 Interview,
and being surprised that he was inspired by Balzac's Louis Lambert.
It was this book that propelled me on the enlightenment quest. In particular
I liked Bly's image of transformation from horizontal to vertical time.
Bly's reading of Tranströmer's "The Scattered Congregation" (May 20)
inspired me to write "What Is The Address?"
the next day (May 21). When I found the story of Nicodemus in the
Gospel of John 3.14, I was amazed that
the words "lifted up" (transcendence) occurs at 3.14— symbol of π.
It inspired my poem "What Nicodemus Came to Learn By Night" (1990).
[These were the three poems I shared with the class when Eavan invited us
to have a read-around of our poems.]
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