Bookworm; Edward Hirsch

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannan Foundation. From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverbrat and this is Bookworm. Today my guest is Edward Hirsch, the author most recently of the demon and the angel, searching for the source of artistic inspiration. Edward Hirsch is a poet whose most recent books include On Love, Earthly Measures, The Night Parade. He teaches at the University of Houston and this is a book about inspiration but in particular the dark inspiration that Garcia Lorca talked about when he talked about something called Dwayne Day. Now what is Dwayne Day? Well Dwayne Day is a Spanish word. We don't have a word for it in English.

I'm all over Spain and Latin America. If you refer to the Dwayne Day, it means something like an Emperor, a Sprite, or the Yiddish Debuk, a little troublesome imp who causes troubles, stirs up trouble, steals your keys, does little sort of wicked things. But in Andalusia, where Lorca was from, Dwayne Day was used in a different way as a sort of idea of dark inspiration, artistic inspiration. So in Andalusia they'd say a flamenco dancer has Dwayne Day or a singer has Dwayne Day, which is some kind of possession, some kind of sense of being taken over by some dark force. Now you say that when you were young you were reading poetry and as you read 18th century poetry with the exception of Christopher Smart and some sections of Pope's version of the Iliad that you weren't finding the insanity, the inspired poetry that you most sought and that it took really romanticism to bring that. Now that is conventionally regarded

as the place where the self entered the poem significantly. In other words, it ego generated these poems. Does Dwayne Day have to do with the assertion of ego? I don't, maybe. I wouldn't put it that way. I would say that maybe the romantic poets brought in the self into poetry, but they also brought something else with that. It would be my way of saying it, which is maybe that has to do with bringing the self and bringing the ego, but I think it also brings something else, which is what we now call the irrational. It also brings in something that is not conscious thought. Member Shelley says in his great defense of poetry, not even the greatest poet can say, I will write poetry because poetry is never entirely at the dispensation of the will. And so it seems to me that the romantic poets, what Keats calls associative drift,

also bring in some kind of irrational force. Now, so this book, The Demon and the Angel, searching for the source of artistic inspiration by my guest Edward Hirsch, published by Harket, is in a sense a gathering and consideration of the poets who not only were interested in the irrational, but sought it, surrendered themselves to it, to some extent courted it, wooed it, in other cases succumbed to it helplessly. But it traces this poetry as trans concept from Warka, where the book begins, but all the way to abstract painting and bebop, it considers the possibility of the untethered, the gooseen, the freed in all of the arts. Now, do you consider your own work to be an example

of work that has freed itself to the extent that the artist you're talking about have? I don't know if you can say that about your own work, it may be for someone else to say about your work, but is it something that you seek? Yes. Now, I would say that it's some, I mean, one of the things that you know, that I'm interested in artists in this book who invited into the room, who welcome it, and I think that maybe my own work has changed in this way, and that I credited it, but also fought against it when I was younger, as I learned my craft and apprentice myself to poetry, and to try and acquire as much as I could in the craft and the history and the reading of poetry, to try and put myself to school in poetry. And the more I mastered the craft, or the more I came to understand poetry, and the more I felt I had learned about it, the more I had written in every

poetic form, the more I began to recognize that there was this other thing that you just had to get on your knees helplessly before and pray to help you, that poetry wasn't ever entirely at the dispensation of your will, that you could let poetry down by not learning about it, but once you had learned everything about it, it still wasn't in your control. I'm one of the great fans of your last book, How to Read a Palm and Fall in Love with Poetry, but it seems to me that what's valuable about these two books is that they are rational. They seem to be genuinely friendly to someone, especially how to read a poem, who is outside the poetic sensibility. In fact, the great virtue of that book was that it became a book I felt able to give to people who don't read poetry, who would be without having to become mysterious and brooding, who would be exposed to brooding

and mysterious poems. Well, thank you for saying so. The Demon and the Angel is the follow-up to How to Read a Palm and that I wouldn't want to read, I wouldn't want to have the Demon and the Angel without How to Read a Palm and I couldn't have written it before. That is, I pick up where that leaves off. So for me, this is a two-part journey and the first part is what is there that we can say as openly, as democratically, as rationally as possible about poetry? How can we think about it? I also felt that there's something else I want to point to. There's some other ingredient in poetry that if readers have come with me on this journey and I hope they have, that I want to say this too is part of the mix. This too is something to consider and think about. What happens when certain poems and other kinds of art leap off, take off in ways that are unpredictable when they

swerve. And part of this was to say this ingredient was also part of poems, but it was also then to enlarge the project to say this same inspiration is working in dance, is working in music, is working in novels, is working in bullfighting. In other words, this force of inspiration now has a kinship in poetry with all the other arts. Now, by the way, you're listening to Bookworm. I'm Michael Silverblatt and my guest is Edward Hirsch, the author of The Demon and the Angel, searching for the source of artistic inspiration. I want to, in a sense, join hands and consider Duane Day. Now, in the beginning of the book, it suggested that a listener to poetry who has Duane Day, it's almost as if it's the opposite of a decoder ring. In order to a person with Duane Day

will not need to have the poem translated into rational imagery. He will be thinking in the code or a sociative logic of the poetry. It begins to suggest then that Lorca, for instance, structured his poems along a, I don't want to say serious because that would be too rational, a clustering of what he called poetic facts. Now, poetic facts would not be facts in an external world. What are poetic facts? Poetic facts are things that would come up in poems as Lorca thinks of them that you wouldn't necessarily experience in daily life. So a poetic fact would be say a crystal angel. That's not anything. Well, there are some people, perhaps, who have actually seen crystalline

angels. But for most of us, we have it. Yet in the context of a poem, something comes up that you might understand what someone like Lorca means when he says the crystal angel soars into the room. I'm just making something up. But in other words, something that didn't exist before that has now been in a way added to reality. It's different. It's sort of the opposite of so-called realistic fiction, which is, I think, problematically, but pretending anyway to notate what's out there in the world in a very literal way, the facticity of the world. But a poetic fact as Lorca uses the term is something that isn't added to reality. So to use an image of Narudas, he says what he loves are roots and wings. But the wings take root and the roots fly. So most people haven't seen flying roots. But in the course of reading a poem or listening to a poem, according to Lorca's

thinking, you would understand what that means. Without having to say, oh, a root is something that belongs to the earth and the ground has been ripped up and now sent towards the sky. I'd love it if you would read the little section from the poet in New York that's toward the end of the book, because it gives an extended instance of an image that has wings. And this is from landscape with and city that does not sleep. Night Song of Brooklyn Bridge. This is from his book, Poet in New York. In the sky, there's nobody asleep, nobody, nobody. Nobody is asleep. The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins. The living iguanas will come to bite the man who do not dream. And the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars. Nobody is asleep on earth, nobody, nobody, nobody is asleep. In the graveyard far off,

there's a corpse who was moaned for three years because of a dry countryside in his knee. And that boy they buried this morning cried so much it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep them quiet. Life is not a dream, careful, careful, careful. We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth. Are we climbed to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dollias? But forgetfulness does not exist. Dreams do not exist. Flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths in a thicket of new veins. And whoever has pain, pains will feel that pain forever. And whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders. Edward Hirsch, reading from Garcia Lorca's poet in New York as quoted in The Demon and the Angel, his book from Harvard. Now I asked for that because that is a version that anyone can fall in love with. It could have been in the previous book.

But when I'm reading Lorca or Neruda as well, there are times when I feel that the freedom of the irrational has taken the poem to a kind of celebration that has not invited me to the party. And what I mean to ask then is that this kind of poetry, it seems, puts the sourest pressure on the process of evaluation. Because if I'm for, say, 20 pages in a rhythmic, translike poem thrown out of the poem, I haven't entered its associative logic, you could say that I'm without Dwayne Day. On the other hand, I could say that the poem is without construction. And really, this is the most, I would say, the most problematic area of poetry, at least modern poetry for many

people. Well, I mean, you're exactly on the reason that why I wanted to write this book and why I wanted to go there because it seemed to me now, let's go further. Let's take things to another kind of edge where poetry is lifted off to some other space. And poems do challenge readers and audiences greatly. And I don't think that there's a single correct answer here. What Lorca is hoping for, what Neruda is hoping for, when Lorca, as I say in the book, when he began his poetry readings, he invited Dwayne Day, invoked the Dwayne Day, because he said only when the Dwayne Day, what's present could one be sure of being loved and understood, and could audiences understand the hard task of following metaphor, of thinking by metaphor. So I think that there's no question that sometimes you get lost as a reader, and sometimes you're left behind, and some poems you may say, actually, I just don't like that. But sometimes you may be locked out because you just don't know how to think in this way. You don't know how to follow the poem. And other times, I think, T.S. Elliott

said, poems communicate before they're understood. And there are other times where, as I think in city that does not sleep, you feel carried away by the emotion and the desperation, even if you can't parse any particular line. So ultimately, you may say, this is not for me. Ultimately, there may be readers who prefer not this kind of poetry, but for something else. But I also think that there are a lot of readers, some of those people came with me on the journey of how to read a poem, who haven't known how to think about this poem. And if they learn how to think about it in this other way, then they might have a more nuanced response to it, to give themselves up to a kind of emotional thinking, a kind of dark joy. Now, when I picked up the book, I kind of began, well, I know about Dwayne Day, but I had not considered that what Rilka talks about, when he talks about being taken by an angel, was what Lorca was talking about by the spirit, giving into the spirit of

the Dwayne Day. Also, we go from Rilka to some of the other great poetry of the century, and you bring to bear the idea that a good deal of what we are talking about, when we talk about modern poetry, is writers who have a sense of a Damon that they are wrestling with. Eventually, in this book, the notion of the irrational and the spiritualized quest becomes so large that you begin to say, well, what doesn't have Dwayne Day? And what doesn't have Dwayne Day? Well, do you remember in trying to, one of the examples I use is Kenneth Tyne in writing about Miles Davis in Holiday magazine said, well, Miles Davis had Dwayne Day. Then he had to figure out, then he

had to explain Dwayne Day to the readers of Holiday. And so he began to say, who has and who doesn't have it? And so he said, well, Ernest Hemingway has it. John O'Hara does not. Marlon Brando had it, but squandered it. Billy Holiday has it. Ella Fitzgerald does not. These are Tyne in his examples. So I guess what doesn't have Dwayne Day is work that is so powered by lightness or rationality. Most musicals, I was watching Gene Kelly dancing the other night, splendid, beautiful, great American art, didn't feel to me like it particularly had Dwayne Day. The American musical seems to me a wonderful form, but it doesn't have Dwayne Day the way say, jazz and blues has Dwayne Day. Interesting idea, because I often think, you see, what you're talking about then is Dwayne Day as the irrational. I think of musicals as

aligning us to the nonsensical. So then it would be true because I suspect that Lewis Carroll does not have Dwayne Day, but he does have goonessy. And he exactly does have joy and it's great pleasure to read, but it seems to me something else. But yes, it's true that I'm pushing a line here to enlarge the idea of Dwayne Day that part of my project is I take Lorca's original idea and I expand it. And you know, the logic of the book is to actually take Dwayne Day back and trace it at a melodically back to demon and then back to the dimole, the Greek term for this, we don't have a word for it, some true indestructible inner self. And then seeing the way that the dimole relates to the idea, the agonistic idea of the angel. So I begin to say the angel, the demon, the dimole, the Dwayne Day are all aspects of night mind. In fact, though, I want to, it would be not

interesting if there weren't a principle of opposition here. And both of us have a tendency to like this kind of work, perhaps more than other work. But I remember that in a book of essays called Nomen, Hugh Canner had announced an intention to write a book called The Night World. In order to talk about what he felt had happened to poetry that had cast off the objective world and ended up in a place that mixed subjectivity with a dream world, leaving a reader completely without ballast, content even. And that one should begin to say that to a certain mind, and it doesn't have to be eye for winter's mind, the Dwayne Day is a symptom of a subjectivity gone toward madness

and leaving the world behind. Do you feel that that's dangerous? It seems to me inevitable. That is the art, the poetry of the music, the dance of our time. We're not wrong in talking about the Graham here in the whole world of the unleashed, dark self. But what about a self that believes that madness is not helpful? Well, one thing I think that's important to recognize is we're not just talking about madness. We're not just talking about delusion. We're talking about a certain kind of irrational force that has been made into art, that has been transformed into art. We're not just talking about people going crazy. We're talking about a crazed force that has been made into art. And I completely agree with you that it's possible to make a total surrealism, for example,

that for long periods of time seems to have so left the counterweight of the world that it's actually not interesting. What I'm trying to reconcile is, I'm with Kenner here. I mean, I don't think that there has to be just this alternation between, say, objectiveist poetry on the one hand and absolute surrealism on another. One of the things I'm trying to reconcile is the way in which this associative drift, what Keats calls associative drift, associative drift, can also work in tandem with what Keats calls the working brain in Odessike. So I don't mean to completely give up the working brain. I don't mean to suggest there shouldn't be some counterweight or importance of the rational intellect. I'm not advocating complete madness and that everything related to the rational intellect is authoritarian in any way. I'm saying that when this force mixes to gather with conscious making, we can often have something that's extraordinary. So one of my

examples is the Sufi poet Ibn Rabi. Ibn Rabi said something that's made a lot of sense to me. He says, a person must control one's thoughts in a dream. Now, what I like about that is it lets in the dream element, but it also keeps the element of control. And Ibn Rabi felt strongly that this could be taught to other Sufi disciples. It wasn't just Hart Crane drinking himself to death. And I think Hart Crane was after something. What he called the logic of metaphor is I think not unrelated to what Keats is calling associative drift or a lurker called poetic fact. But I take your point, which is it seems to me important to have the counterweight of making art. And all of the figures I write about seem to me artists of a high order. I wouldn't be interested from a poetic standpoint, just in random associations of people who are crazy. The examples in this book

more or less end at the end of the 60s. The reason it seems to me is that if you wanted to follow the random drift, you'd be talking about language poetry and most of you guys don't like language poetry. Not only that, the language poets have an essential argument, which is to make sense is to join the spirit of capitalism that even syntax has become capitalistic. And they are interested in making a post hierarchical, non-sense related poetry. But you're not taking any of the work there because it seems to me that in modern dance, as well as modern poetry, even the work of John Ashbury, which seems to ask the reader book by book, are these the poems

that make dream sense, or are these the poems that make nonsense, or are these the poems that only make juxtaposed, post-sense? That the question has moved on from the question you're asking in this book. Well, maybe there's another way of thinking about it, that I'm advocating for bringing something back, perhaps you're right, and perhaps I'm saying that I take your point, but something has been lost in this argument. And the thing that I would say additionally, that the element of duende that seems to me important, that maybe I want to bring back into the mix, that I want to add to language poetry, because I take your point in terms of what it's doing. It seems to me what is often missing is this element of dark emotion. And this element of emotion, which I actually hear sometimes in

Ashbury's poetry, but I don't hear in a lot of language poetry, is this other underlying emotional force, and that seems to me important in art, in all kinds of art. So you're right. For example, I write about Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, but I don't write about the minimalist that come after, because minimalism, which I think is very, very aesthetically beautiful, is also very, very cool. And the difference for me of this painting that often follows this abstract expressionist painting, is it often misses this expressive element, this other either personal or subjective, or I would say emotional aspect to the making of art. So I don't want to return art to the 1960s. My plan is not that art stops in 1960, but my suggestion is that this

way of thinking about art, in demonic thinking in art, which is not so different than angelic thinking in art, this other spiritual force, seems to me important for us to keep alive, in the way we think about what we read and what we experience in art. I'm arguing on behalf of a kind of experimental, innovative, a spirit in American poetry, that also brings to the table this key ingredient that I think is important in our spiritual lives. I've been speaking to Edward Hirsch about his new book, The Demon and the Angel, searching for the source of artistic inspiration published by Harkard. Thank you very much for joining me. Thank you Michael, what a joy to be together. My associate producer is Melinda Siegel, the technical director is Rhaegwana,

special production assistants from Alan Howard and Mario Diaz. I'm Michael Silverblatt, join me again next week on Bookworm. Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannan Foundation. This program is produced in the studios of KCRW Santa Monica. Archived editions of this and other Bookworm programs can be found online at KCRW.com, keyword bookworm. Cassette copies are available for ordering information called 310-450-5183.