Mary Ruefle appeared at the Hill Center and was a very engaging presence in the conversation with the Post‘s Ron Charles.
She also signed my copy of Madness, Rack, and Honey – with a special little something on account of my name (which is ‘Honey,’ by the way).
This collection brings together the three poetry collections Charles Wright published during the 1980s: The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), and Zone Journals(1988). Also, at the end, there is something short (a chapbook?) called Xionia which reads as part and parcel of Zone Journals, down to titling various poems as ‘journals.’
When I saw him read at the Library of Congress, I mentioned how much the poems from Zone Journals reminded me of the Cantos. Having just finished the book, I can say that every book he published in eighties was pregnant with Pound’s influence.
Besides their shared love of Italy, the style is very Poundian, with the Whitman-esque lines, only dripping with allusion and a sort of distant nostalgia for a place that maybe you never even knew.
But Wright is not Pound and I wish I had not read it so aware of Pound and therefore reading Pound through him because, even though Wright is genius, there are geniuses and there are geniuses. Wright is the former. Pound is the latter.
Wright’s semi-Cantos mix landscapes and memories from his early years in Appalachia, from time living in Montana – a sort of rural, hardscrabble, American mythopoetic time – with time from his years in the military posted in Italy and latter years studying literature in Rome. The balance can sometimes be uneasy (though the balance of everything in the Cantos, to be fair, is also uneasy), though.
The genius in this is not the monumental historical scope of Pound, but a more interior view. But an interior view of the exterior world. The environment filtered through memory. A couple of times, he mentions vaseline, as in vaseline-colored light or seeing things as if through vaseline. Now, he doesn’t strike me as movie obsessed guy, so I don’t think this a reference to a camera trick to make actors look younger, but rather a way to try and explain the haze of temporal distance and memory.
What? No Shakespeare! Inconceivable! And yes, that’s another movie reference.
This just sounds awesome. How can I get myself invited to one of these ‘Little Salons?’
Nothing short of genius will do. Genius… and no sex. Wait… what?
Thursday, April 30, was the final, formal appearance of current Poet Laureate, Charles Wright, at the Library of Congress. Rather than do a lecture, there was a conversation between Wright and the fifteenth Poet Laureate (Wright is the twentieth), Charles Simic. Don Share, the editor of Poetry, moderated and asked the questions.
I used to be a great fan of Simic and while I don’t read as much anymore, his collection of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End, had an earth shattering effect on my sense of poetry. Wright is someone who I only learned to enjoy after I first heard him read at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Everyone on stage was charming and intelligent and witty, but there was too much charm and wit on display and not enough talk about poetry. I like Share, but I rather wish his more contemplative editorial predecessor, Christian Wiman, has been on stage.
I brought a copy of The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990 for Wright to sign. The later poems in there, taken from Zone Journals, struck me very forcibly as being reminiscent of Pound’s Cantos (everywhere, I am constantly reminded that I haven’t finished my systematic reading of it yet). Partly, it was the Whitman-esque form of the lines and stanzas, but also the deep influence of Italy on both men. But you could tell that Wright had once been in love with Pound and carried the Cantos with him in a backpack. During part of the conversation, Wright did mention the Cantos and Pound and their crazy genius. He clearly loved Pound very much. When I asked him about Pound, he said he wasn’t really thinking about that ‘crazy genius’ when he wrote Zone Journals. He had read the Cantos as a young man, but not since. Which is fair. Works like that are for a young man’s adoration and an older man’s guarded nostalgia.
First things first: kudos to Mary Ruefle for using the Oxford comma in her title! I love that little comma. If you are a semi-regular reader of these semi-daily musings, you have probably already noticed that I use it myself. Generally, I like commas. Aesthetically speaking.
Ruefle is a poet, but Madness, Rack, And Honey is a collection of essays. I’m not a huge fan of her poetry, if I am being completely honest, but this book has been staring at my from the shelves of the poetry section in downtown DC’s Barnes & Noble for some time. Eventually, I submitted.
Ok then. It’s a good book, but it’s got its highlights and lowlights. The essays on ‘Secrets’ and ‘Fear’ are definite highlights. The inquisition about secrets and poetry, with some references to Jesus thrown in, is amazing. Similarly, the lecture on fear and poetry is great. Does fear inspire a poet? Stop a poet? Are you afraid when you’re writing or when you’re not? Is writing scary? Is being a poet scary or does it relieve fear? Is fear the source of knowledge, as Nietzsche claims?
But the ending drags, with a serious of unsystematic brief essays and ‘gobbets’ that add to something closer to laziness than insight.
So, National Poetry Month, also known as ‘April,’ ends today. So read a poem. April was chosen because of Eliot’s The Wasteland. So you could read that. Or read some Robert Frost (but read him carefully; to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, he doesn’t mean what you think he means). Or Whitman. C’mon. Whitman is, like, totally All-American, you know? There’s even some Whitman written over the escalator at the Q Street entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro Station. Or, you know… the internet. It’s everywhere. So check some out, but take your time reading it. Read it slowly and try to actually see something in it.
And, by the way, you could even read some tomorrow, as well as reading some today. Even though May is not Poetry Month, I check with an attorney and it’s totally okay to read poetry in May. Or June. Do you see where I’m going with this?
That is all.
the coffee philosopher 