Poets at Work; 1; Poet as Poet

I'll see. University of Nebraska Television presents poets at work. In this program, the University of Nebraska and W.D. is not grass of Wayne University. Join John Frederick Nimms, Editor of Poetry Magazine to discuss the poet as poet. Introducing the poets is Robert E. Noel, Professor of English, at the University of Nebraska.

In recent times, the poets have even more come into the public view. Robert Frost appears at inaugural celebrations. Mr. T.S. Eliot appears on the front page of the New York Times. Carl Sandberg is a television personality. The poet becomes even more than before, perhaps, a man in the community, a man speaking to men. And perhaps this is what Louis McNeese, a distinguished contemporary British poet, has in mind when he prescribes or limits some of the qualities a poet, contemporary poet, might have. Louis McNeese has written, I would have a poet, able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers capable of pity and laughter. Informed in economics, appreciative of women involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions. Today's poets seem to be involved in the world's affairs,

in short, they seem to be poets at work. I have with me three such poets who work for a living. I have among them Mr. Carl Shapiro, a Pulitzer Prize poet, a teacher at the University of Nebraska. Mr. Shapiro, how many volumes of verse have you written? Eight or nine, I think. I haven't kept track of all of them. Some of them I don't even have copies of. Well, eight or nine, well, because when I was young, I published some things myself, copies disappeared and so on. And some books overlap others. It's hard to tell. That's very curious. And Mr. John Frederick Nims, a distinguished poet, editor of poetry magazine. Your last book, Mr. Nims, was called Knowledge of the Evening. That's an interesting title. What does it mean? Well, the title comes from the writings of St. John of the Cross. He speaks of two kinds of knowledge, knowledge of the evening,

which is the knowledge of an ultimate reality, which we gather from the things of this world, as opposed to knowledge of the morning, which is the direct insight into God or whatever we call ultimate reality. Which the mystics have? I hope, John, that you will read us a poem or two from that volume before this period is finished. And I have my third guest, Mr. W. D. Snodgrass, a poet, Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry in 1960, whose little book called Hearts Needle has been very highly praised. Mr. Snodgrass, how many years did it take you to write that book? Well, I think about five, probably, although some of the poems in there had been started earlier, perhaps as much as three years before that, some of them perhaps eight years altogether. It takes a long time to turn out a book of verse, doesn't it? It takes me a long time. William Butler Yates, one of the distinguished poets of the last generation who died in 1939, said that when the quarrels we have with others,

we turn into rhetoric. The quarrels we have with ourselves, we turn into poetry. It might be interesting to ask our poets today if the poems which they write are the results of the quarrels they have with themselves. And if they would tell us a little of the quarrel and read a poem or two to illustrate perhaps something of the results of the quarrel. Carl, are your poems the results of private quarrels you have with yourself? Oh, perhaps sometimes. But could we go back a minute? There's something you quoted by Louis McNees has been sticking in my crawl. That quotation you read that sounded like we were all members of the junior chamber of commerce. And I don't really buy that with all due respect to McNees. I don't think he covers the ground at all.

In fact, I'm not particularly proud of making a living. I rather wonder that I do. But this conferring of respectability to that degree on poets I think is pretty far field. Well, I don't see that he was talking about respectability or earning a living at all or any of those things. As a matter of fact, I'm proud to earn a living. It's so hard for me. It's unusual for him to overcome a lot to be able to do it. It's a mental image of poets sitting in rock and chairs with slippers on smoke and pipes, and looking out at the tulips. This kind of very suburban middle-class image of the poet. I'm positive that this image does not fit Louis McNees. But I'm sure it fits what he or almost anybody would like to be, which is, mostly what it's saying is that he wants people to have all their senses and their feelings and so forth alive. I would appreciate women. That's nice, you know. I would have thought that what he meant was that a poet must be a member of society.

But he was like, I should have thought that's what he meant. That a poet was like other men in that he comes equipped with all the faculties. Well, he does come equipped with all the faculties and he ought to have them alive. He ought to be able to read the newspapers like women, get involved with other people, be interested in politics and susceptible to impressions. But a poet doesn't have to be a sorry, John. A member of society at all. Most of the interesting poets in any period were people who deliberately stepped outside the environment of their society. That in some, I mean, they are outside the limits of their society just that they are more alive, that they are more able to think for themselves and to feel for themselves. I just want to get this on the record. But they don't have... That isn't a matter of picking up and walking out of society. Sometimes it is. Well, picking up and walking out is usually... It seems to me, pretty much just a substitute for ability. In other words, you can put on the trappings of ability so much easier than you can put on ability. You agree all the time?

No. I don't agree. I don't agree with what Mr. McNes says. I agree that the poet should be susceptible to physical impressions. And I remember that Lorca said the poet should be a professor of the five senses. On the other hand, was Milton any less a poet when he was no longer susceptible to certain physical impressions when he lost his sight. Why should a poet be able bodied? What about leopodity or a pope? Why should he be fond of talking? Why should he read the newspapers? I've always felt that physically speaking, poets can be divided into good-looking men and monsters. And what they look like doesn't seem to have much bearing on how good. Which ones are represented here? I don't know. I like that better than the usual divisions of poets that you can't understand. That makes you more sense. Much more useful. Well, I think we ought to have you people, if you're willing, read some of your poems and talk about how you are the professors of the five senses if indeed you are. Carl, would you read us one of your poems?

Yes, I don't know whether this has as much to do with the sensory as most of my poems do because I enjoy the senses very much. But this is more, I suppose, kind of intellectual, somewhat satirical poem in a book called Poems of a Jew, and it's about nuns at a time when I was teaching nuns in the university. It's called Teasing the Nuns. The nuns always struck me as being the last of the race of ladies. They dress like ladies, they act like ladies, and there aren't any other ladies left around. And then my being in the middle of this female society of nuns is also very paradoxical, the Jew and the Catholic and so on. We all go up in the elevator like we're going to heaven, and I really don't have anything to say to them. Teasing the nuns. Up in the elevator went the nuns while there's a cage of undemestic ducks, turning and twitering their unclipped hats, gay in captivity, a flirtatious flock of waterfowl, tipped with black above the traffic and its searing suns.

Higher and higher in the wall we flew, hauled on by rosaries and split strands of hair, myself in the center sailing like Sinbad, yanked into heaven by a hairy rock. Once we emerged into a towering cell where Holy Cross was played upon the wall, in taxidermy of the eternal. They be decked in elegant bird names, dropped curtsies, I thought, and merrily sat and fixed their gaze on mine that floated out between them and their poisoned hawk. Sisters, I said, and then I stopped. That's very witty. Now, but that poem, as handsome a poem as it is, doesn't seem to have much of the quarrel with yourself, which Yates prescribes for all poetry. Do you think it does, Carl? I didn't intend it to, although it does have, you know, a slight little intellectual conflict in it, but I'm making fun of it, or making light of it, rather, to some extent it. John, do your poems have the kind of conflict which Yates seems to be requiring?

I'm not very aware of this quarrel with myself. Perhaps I haven't thought about it enough. In a poem here called The Young Ionia, I am concerned with a problem and perhaps two halves of myself are debating. It's a quarrel in another way, too. The rhythm of this poem was suggested by a Greek rhythm, which I came across in reading Euripides. It's apparently much used in Dionysian passages in the choruses. It's called Ionic Aminarae, and it's two unstressed syllables, followed by two stressed syllables, DDD. And I wondered first if this rhythm would be of any use in English and started experimenting with it. And I suppose then there was a kind of quarrel between what I wanted to say and what the rhythm demanded. But this quarrel became like the quarrel between a writer and a horse already broken, perhaps. I mean, I hope that I broke this rhythm, so I was writing it rather than being written by it.

I hope I did. If you could come on the late train for the same walk, or a hush talk by the fireplace when the ash flares, as a heart could, if a heart would to recall you, to recall all in a long look, to enrap you as it once had when the rain streamed on the fall air. And we knew then that was all wrong. It was love lost in a year lost of the few years we account most. But the bow blew, and the cloud blew, and the sky fell from its rose ledge on the woods rim to the one brook. And the clock read to the half dead, a profound page as the cloud broke, and the moon spoke, and the door shook. If you could come, and it meant come at the steep price we regret yet as the dead swells in the night time. And the could come, if you could, home in the skull's drum, and the loom's rise till the bed cries like a hurt thing.

If you could, ah, but the moon's dead and the clock's dead. For we know now, we can give all, but it won't do. Not the day's length, nor the black strength, nor the blood's flush. What we took once for a sure thing, for delights right, for the clear eve with its wild star in the sunset, we would have back at the old cost at the old grief, and we beg love for the same pain for a last chance. Then the God turns with a low laugh as the leaves hush, but the eyes ice and there's no twice. The benign gaze is on some wall, but on ours know, and the leaves rush. There's always a kind of quarrel, perhaps, between what one wants to say and the resistant medium, which says, no, you can't do that without using words unnatural.

That, I don't suppose, is exactly what Yates had in mind. No. When Yates talks about the quarrel, when Yates talks about the quarrel, you have with yourself, which results in poetry, it's not a matter of craft. Yates never grew up. He was still having a quarrel with himself when he was an old man about it. He wished he could hold that young girl in his arms. He should have gotten over that. Oh, I don't know. What would you ever know that was that much you wanted? Who did you ever know? Who wanted to be that much you wanted? But he was a peevish and petulant about it. You know, a child of a son kicking the table, kind of. But Yates is rather a special case, isn't he? His poems were debates with himself. So many of them, the vast solutions, as he called one, you know, all the dialogue poems in which he splits himself up in the hick and ill-a, or some two people and argues with himself and doesn't resolve it. But John, isn't it true that this is one of the qualities of modern verse generally? That is that you've got this tension in the individual line in which you try to resolve

the hope to talk about irony, is this, in part, isn't it? Don't you think so, Dee? I talked about this. I certainly feel that a poem to me isn't an imitation of life, unless it has a lot of conflict and tension in it. I've been specially interested in the problem, how you handle the conflict and a lot of my poems. I've tried to get away from that balancing of the conflict in each line to a poem that would change its mind halfway through, probably after getting very absurd, taking one side of my feelings and following them till they got just ridiculous and then coming back the other way. You mean rather than having the conflict within the line, the conflict within the total poem for you? I think generally in modern poetry very often. I mean, academic modern poetry is the conflict within the phrase. Yes, yes. That is so you've got this constant balance of tension. Yeah, and it's always a stasis. It can't go any place. It can't move poems frozen. Why don't you read one of your poems, Dee, and show us how you've worked with the conflict? I don't know.

I don't think this one goes quite this way. The one I would like to read. But it seems to me it is very much about an internal conflict with myself. And it doesn't reach any very much of a decision about it. I didn't realize how much this was about it, kind of dialogue about myself and with myself until I went into analysis afterwards. Then I began to see something about it. You mean this poem? Yeah. There's one about a moth and it's called lying away. Let me interrupt for just a minute about that word frozen, which I'm not very happy about. Because this kind of tension can be a dynamic tension, as well as that of an... It's not just the solidity of an ice cube, perhaps, which I have two wrestlers absolutely locked in an intensity of the effort. But for instance, the sort of standard, simplest poem, for instance, you end up with a swan frozen in the ice in Malarmay, or with Rambo in that boat that's chained there, and he can't move any direction. Real because Panther that lies there and unable to move inside the cage. Well, you're moth. Your moth is not frozen.

This is better not get into this because it could go on for hours. I didn't like that word frozen either, because there's so much poetry that's written in deep freeze nowadays. Yeah, well, that's what I mean. That's exactly the kind of thing that I've been trying to get away from. Well, there's about a moth that... I mean, we lived in an old house full of holes, and they all seemed desperate to get in until they got inside, and they all seemed desperate to get out. They seemed very human to me. It's called lying awake. This moth caught in the room tonight, squirmed up sniper style between the rusty edges of the screen. Then, long as the room stayed light, lay here, content in some corner hole. Now that we have settled into bed, though, he can't sleep. Overhead, he throws himself at the blank wall. Each night, hordes of these flutters, haunt and climb my study window pane, fired by reflection,

they're insane eyes, gleam. They know what they want. How do the petulant things survive? Out in the fields? They have a place and proper work, furthering the race. Why this blind, fanatical drive indoors? Why rush at every spark, cigar, headlamp, or railway warning to knock off your wings and starve by morning? And what could a moth fear in the dark, compared with what you meet inside? Still, he rams the fluorescent face of the clock, thinks that's another place of light and families where he'll hide. We'd ought to trap him in a jar, or come like the white coats with a net, and turn him out toward living. Yet we don't. We take things as they are. I guess it reached a decision not to do anything about it. A decision not to decide.

All three of you poets have done some distinguished translating in your time. And I should think that the very poems you choose to turn into English verse might reflect some qualities of the conflict you find within yourselves. Is that true? Why do you choose the poems to translate which you do translate? Is it only because you like them, John? Of course. Why else? You might like some kind of technical problem they offer. I don't think it's that so much as a fact that I like the poetry so much that I would like to work in this rather work with it in this rather intimate way and see if I can do something that corresponds to what has been done in English. Imagine in a way how this poet would have written had he been writing in our time in English. Would you read us a poem and show us how you worked at it? Or is that too big in order?

No, I can show you some of the difficulties that one runs into in translating. The masterpiece of St. John of the Cross is a kind of quarrel with himself. This is interesting. It's another dialogue between the soul and God though he sees it as between loved and lover, the girl and the boy. And the kind of quarrel with the reconciliation goes on between them. Well, this poem opens with a sort of cry of despair. The girl, just the human soul, the girl because one can read this just as a loved poem. The girl says, where have you hidden? And in Spanish, that's a dondé tés con dés with these two deep sounds on, on. And various critics have heard in this line kind of reverberation of the dungeon which this was written. It's deep and solemn rather wild in English. When we say this literally,

we get, where did you hide? Maybe I cheated a bit saying it that way. But it's much thinner in some rather thin and flat and weak. And one loses that in English. Or what does one do with this great line in which he's saying that something communicates with him in a stammering way. The line in Spanish is unno se que que en bábacinto. The three caves are perfectly natural. Anyone saying that in Spanish might have them all together. But in English, what do you do? If you just translate, how do you? Something they keep stammering. You've lost the way the idea has been dramatized in the poem. Would you read us one of, you can't read us all of that poem, can you? Not in this program. It's rather a rather long poem. One that I think interesting is one about the birth of Christ which sees the birth of Christ rather daringly. And St. John of the cross has shocked lots of people.

As you probably know, among the devout especially. One that sees the birth of Christ in terms of with imagery of a marriage between God and man. The two unite in this way is a man and a woman do in marriage. There seems to me something surrealist about the imagery of this poem. And I can see why Dolly has been so attracted by St. John of the cross. His famous crucifixion was inspired by a little drawing that St. John himself did. Well, this Christmas poem goes, in time it came round the time ripe for the birth of a boy. Much as a bridegroom steps fresh from the chamber of joy, arm and arm he arrived and twining the sweetheart he chose. Both in a buyer at hand, the pleasant mother reposed, among oxen and burrows and such as the winter sky drove in. How they struck up a tune, those folk, sweeter the angels sang.

There was a bridle to chant. There was a pair, well-wed. But why did he sob and sob, God, and his rough human bed, such a dazzle of tears? This gift, all at the bride, could bring, how the mother was struck at so topsy-turvy a thing, distress of the flesh in God, in man the pitch of delight, pears never coupled so different as day and night. How do you choose a poem to translate, Carl? Well, when I do, it's a poem that I like so much, I wish I had written it, or something that's short. I had one here that's a boat layer of sonnet about a giantess, and maybe it would help to say, I wrote this poem on a troop ship, where there were 15,000 soldiers and no giantesses. And of course, I was doing, I guess,

what boat layer was doing, too, having this immense nostalgia for the female, mother nature, mother nature, woman. When nature once in lustful heart undressed, conceived gargantuan offspring, then what I have loved to live near a young giantess, like a voluptuous cat at a queen's feet. To see her body flower with her desire, and freely spread out in its dreadful play, guess if her heart concealed some heavy fire, whose humid smokes would swim upon her eye. To feel it leisure, her stupendous shapes crawl on the cliffs of her enormous knees. And when the unhealthy summer suns fatigued, have her stretch out across the plains, and so sleep in the shadow of her breasts at ease, like a small hamlet at a mountain's base. As unlike as your two poems are, they do have some qualities in common,

which are, in part, the conflict between the subject and the theme. That is, you talk about your religious subject, whatever the subject of your poem is, and then the extravagant way it's put. So there is a kind of conflict there, too, isn't it? I would say my poem is about love rather than... The job is, this is quite a surrealistic. You could see Salvador Dali who might don't like using this kind of thing. He does all the time. Oh, yes, the landscape is the jazz. What kind of thing do you like to translate, D? Well, when I first started translating, I was doing it because my subject matter was being too hard for me and Robert Lowell suggested to do some, but I found that the ones I chose were almost always ones about my subject matter, about being frozen, like the Rambo memoir, where he's frozen in that boat at the end, and can't move. I mean, in my trouble was I couldn't move, I couldn't do anything. But I've lately got to translating a whole bunch of poems

out of Christian Morgan's turn, a comical German poet, died about 1914, and people in Germany love him. People here don't know him much at all. And I do the... I don't read German. I do these with a Vietnamese girl named Laura Grossman, and she gives me a prose version which I play with, and then I send it to her, and then she sends it back, and tells me what I got to do different, and then we just keep going back and forth. Yeah, he was a dictionary at all? No, man. But mostly, she gives me such complete notes and such good... She's very sensitive to language. She's a good prose writer. Why don't you read your poem? Yeah. Well, this one is called Palmstrom. It's about one of Morgan Stern's best-known characters, who he invented. He's a very gentle, sweet, kindly man, also very neurotic. And at heart, I mean, at a bedrock, he's sort of a petty clerk, but he loves to put on romantical and poetical heirs. And he's a very charming man. Palmstrom. Palmstrom. Standing beside the brook, unfolds a handkerchief wide and red,

on which a might he oak is shown, and someone with an open book. Blow his nose. He would not dare. For he belongs to that sort of man who are so often, nakedly, stricken by beauty unaware. What he is only just outspread, tenderly now he has to close. No sensitive spirit will condemn him, marching on with unblown nose. We have three quite different kinds of translations here. Perhaps it is too much to say with William Butler Yates that all poems result from a quarrel with oneself. And perhaps it is too much to say that the quarrels we have with others turn us to rhetoric. What it is safe to say, I think, is that out of whatever the quarrels, whatever the cause, the genuine poet turns his private material

to public usefulness, that he turns his private concerns to general significance, specially gifted and specially skilled, he yet remains a man among men. The poet has been the subject of this poet's work program. Appearing where a poet surprised winning poet's Carlos Shapiro of the University of Nebraska and W.D. is not grads of Wayne University. They were joined by John Frederick Nim, editor of Poetry Magazine and Robert E. Knoll, professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Poets at work was produced and directed by Robert Slater

for University of Nebraska television. This is N-E-T National Educational Television. Thank you. Thank you.