Monthly Archives: March 2009

The Voice that is Great Within Us

Posted on by

About the time Henry initiated the Plumbline School, Ron Silliman was drawing up lists, one of which indicated that Hayden Carruth “isn’t much read” these days, a judgment I started out to dispute, then thought, “Oh, what the hell,” and let it drop. Many of Carruth’s books are in fact in print — there are both a Collected Longer Poems and a Collected Shorter Poems from Copper Canyon Press, along with several books of essays on poetry and jazz. Carruth was a second-generation American modernist, though, and it is that generation, that includes Lowell and Bishop and Roethke, that the currently ascendent schools of poetry must be at pains to dismiss; thus, I’d argue, Silliman’s offhand remark.

But that’s by way of prologue. Carruth has been very important to me in charting my own course down the center. So I was pleased to find Henry’s post with the long quote from Carruth the other day. Here is another part of the case for Carruth being made an honorary member of the Plumbline School: His 1970 mass-market poetry anthology (also still in print), The Voice that is Great Within Us. I’m just getting ready to return to Vietnam. When I go there, I usually try to take a couple of American books to give to friends there, many of whom are English teachers and professional translators, and poets. In browsing around Amazon, I ran across the Carruth anthology, which I have given away to many students over the years, but which I hadn’t looked at closely for a while. I ordered a copy, which arrived yesterday. In his introduction, Carruth talks about getting an envelope of poems from Wallace Stevens on day and another from E.E. Cummings the next when he was editor of Poetry magazine. He goes on to sketch out the capaciousness of American poetry and his anthology selections reveal a very wide taste; more than that, they reveal a time in American poetry before the Fall.

A look at the Table of Contents of The Voice that is Great Within Us provides evidence of a prelapsarian paradise where Jack Spicer and Conrad Aiken have converse, where Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fearing meet on friendly terms, and so on: Lorine Niedecker, Richard Eberhardt, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Thomas McGrath, William Bronk, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Donald Justic, Richard Wilbur. . . Carruth’s anthology suggests that American poets might have more in common than they realize. The recent divisions are largely political, I’d argue, rather than aesthetic. No, check that. I’d say that in the recent divisions into schools, a narrow politics drives aesthetics.

_____________________
Cross-posted to The Plumbline School.

Interview in Saigon Online

Posted on by

There is an interview with me regarding my upcoming trip to Vietnam in Saigon Online. Conducted in English, the piece was translated into Vietnamese by my friend Ly Lan. Here is the English version:

Question: You have been coming to Vietnam since the 1990s and you lived for a year in Hanoi as a Fulbright scholar. As an American poet, what interests you about Vietnam?

Answer: There is a general response I can give, as an American citizen, then a more specific response, speaking as a poet. As an American, my first response is that I simply enjoy Vietnam-the people, the food, the cities, the landscape, the culture. As many American tourists discover with each passing year, Vietnam is a lovely place to visit. But since my fist trip, in 1996, I have had the sense that there is something deeper and more subtle that pulls me to Vietnam. On that first trip, I traveled with a group of American Academics and while it was very enlightening, we traveled on one of those big air-conditioned tourist busses. I remember one particular occasion, driving down Nguyen Thai Hoc in Hanoi, past the big statue of Lenin, I looked out at the street – the kids playing soccer, the pedestrians, the chaotic traffic, and I said to myself (I can remember this distinctly), I want to be out there, not behind this glass window. A couple of years later, living in Ngoc Ha, I walked past that park nearly every day.

Q: Did you find that deeper thing you were looking for?

A: Maybe. It’s complicated. American culture is oriented toward the individual and what I sensed in Vietnam was a different orientation, toward the family and the community. I find this very attractive, though, to be honest, the Vietnamese attitude toward the individual can be, well, surprising and sometimes exhausting. When I was first studying Vietnamese, it did not surprise me to learn that the literal translation of the standard Vietnamese greeting Di dau day? is Where you going? Often, cyclo drivers and postcard sellers would simply use the English version of the phrase, which, to an American, seems intrusive. None of your business! one is tempted to exclaim. Perhaps that is a trivial example. And, for the most part, I find the Vietnamese emphasis on friendship and community very healthy. I think Americans tend to be too focused on the needs of the individual and not sufficiently focused on the needs of the group.

Q: What made you interested in the first place? Why did you make that first trip in 1996?

A: I grew up during the American War. My family, without knowing anything about Vietnam, accepted the American government’s reasons for fighting in Vietnam; but as I got a little older-this would have been in 1968, when I was in high school-I began to question the US war and by the time I went to college and learned a little more about the war, I protested against it. To be honest, some of my protest was motivated by self-interest: I did not want to be a soldier. But I had also come to believe that the war was a terrible mistake. And unfortunately, the Bush Administration committed an almost identical mistake in Iraq in recent years-they didn’t learn anything from the war in Vietnam. Continue reading →

This Broke My Heart

Posted on by

Suicide runs in families, but Sylvia Plath’s son Nicholas Hughes had apparently made a successful life for himself outside the glare of his mother’s myth. Now, suffering from depression, he has committed suicide. A specialist in river ecology and fish, he was a respected biologist in Alaska. “On a memorial page . . .  Lauren Tuori wrote of Mr. Hughes, recalling how he would often ‘seek out a larch tree in a forest of spruce’.” [More commentary here.]

Spring Birds

Posted on by

The first Canada geese came back about ten days ago and more have now established themselves on the island in the river near the bridge. A couple of days ago the red wing blackbirds came back en masse, filling the still-bare maple trees and setting up a huge racket. Just now, I watched a bald eagle circle several times out over the water, then turn and fly over our house toward the woods.

Cold and Bright

Posted on by

Cold and bright this morning, with a skim of fresh ice on the river. The trees are still bare. The terriers got me up at dawn — just before, actually — and I saw a waning crescent moon in a cold blue-black sky. The Canada geese returned yesterday, though, and they were already setting up a racket on the Racquette, so spring must be here. I’m still feeding the goldfinches, but when this barrel of sunflower seed is gone, that’s it for the greedy little buggers. I’ve seen a flock of starlings and a few scattered songbirds the last few days, house finches. It will just be getting really nice when I leave for Vietnam in a month, where it will be full-on hot.