New York Times - Poetry and Poets

Saffron · Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2008 8:51 pm Post subject: New York Times - Poetry and Poets

November 9, 2008
Children’s Books
The Lives of the Poets
By SARA LONDON
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A RIVER OF WORDS

The Story of William Carlos Williams

By Jen Bryant. Illustrated by Melissa Sweet

Unpaged. Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. $17. (Ages 7 and up)

MY LETTER TO THE WORLD

And Other Poems

By Emily Dickinson. Illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault

Unpaged. KCP Poetry/Kids Can Press. Cloth, $17.95; paper, $9.95. (Ages 10 and up)

When I was 8 or 9 I copied a poem from a library book in loopy cursive and taped it to the wall over my bed. I was enchanted by Robert Frost’s catchy claim that he was “one of the children told” that “blowing dust” was “really gold.” But the real nugget for me was “the Golden Gate.” Frost and I were both born in San Francisco. And he, too, I learned with delight, had lived in Vermont, loved apple trees and bendy birches.

Though the lives of poets often remain mysteriously veiled during our earliest encounters with poetry, biographical details can provide an important bridge of accessibility for young readers. It wasn’t until college that I learned William Carlos Williams, another favorite, was a doctor. This New Jersey native, who had made a memorable word picture with a red wheelbarrow, chickens and rain, had helped change the way a new generation of writers thought about poetry. The fact that he also made house calls and presided over births added an extra dose of human appeal.

How Williams found his way to poetry and medicine is the subject of Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet’s lively new biography for children, “A River of Words” (named a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book this year). Their nature-loving “Willie Williams” is smart and athletic, and loves to listen to the music of the Passaic River as it goes “slipping and sliding over / the smooth rocks.” Alone in his room he writes lines, counting the beats and making the end-words rhyme.

But what preoccupies him are the “pictures in his mind” that don’t “fit” regular rhythms or rhymes. He’s drawn to “ordinary things — / plums, wheelbarrows and weeds, / fire engines, children and trees,” details cleverly integrated in Sweet’s multimedia illustrations.

Even as Williams studies to become a doctor, he meets Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, and everywhere there are signs that his mind is at work on poems. His creative impulses are beautifully conveyed in Sweet’s collaged watercolor and pencil compositions, often layered over the covers of old clothbound books. Words are scribbled on ruled sheets, prescription pads, receipts. There are yellow-bellied birds “quarreling with sharp voices / over things / that interest them” and a house-call road map with a note: “They call me and I go.” Changing typography further animates the illustrations, as in a fiery collage of 5’s surrounding Williams’s firetruck poem (which inspired his friend Charles Demuth’s painting “The Figure 5 in Gold”). Flip to the lime-green end pages and you’ll find Williams’s seeds of inspiration fully sprouted as poems.

Sweet’s illustrations are playfully distracting — the eye hops sparrowlike from leaf to leaf, uncertain where to settle. But the narrative unfolds clearly and chronologically in graceful free verse. The child who “notices everything” as he walks through “the high grasses and along the soft dirt paths” follows in the footsteps of his physician uncle, but “could not stop writing poems.” Williams’s legacy as a trailblazer in 20th-century American poetry is explained in a helpful author’s note, accompanied by a full chronology, at the end of the book.

“A River of Words” insightfully portrays the writing life. So much depends upon red-hot passion, lots of practice and putting it simply and vividly: “There is a bird in the poplars! / It is the sun!”

Emily Dickinson also employed metaphor, but she remained wedded to the music of metrics: “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers — / That perches in the soul.” “My Letter to the World: And Other Poems,” from Kids Can Press’s valuable “Visions in Poetry” series, is an elegant introduction to the work of that mysterious belle of Amherst (who died when Williams was 2).

While rereading Dickinson’s riddle-like lines, I was struck by the power of Isabelle Arsenault’s haunting and expressive visual interpretations. Her delicate color-washed drawings of a ghostlike Emily in her white dress, of doleful trees and marching ladies’ boots, depict a dreamlike 19th-century otherworld. Yet for all the muted tones (there’s plenty of black and gray), Arsenault avoids the dreary. Amid the shadows there’s lightness and humor to be found, and even Alice-in-Wonderland-like antics as Emily tumbles lovesick from the sky, wearing a porcelain-teacup skirt: “I cannot live with You — / It would be Life — / And Life is over there — / Behind the Shelf.”

Illumination opens this lovely selection (“There’s a certain Slant of light”) and closes it, too — Arsenault’s image of the perching bird that is “hope” glows in gold and orange hues. In between are Dickinson’s complex mortal musings, including “Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” So appealing are Dickinson’s short lines, rhymes and alliteration that music and meaning often emerge like small miracles: “How dreary — to be — Somebody! / How public — like a Frog — / To tell one’s name — the livelong June — / To an admiring Bog!”

Readers of all ages will indeed “judge tenderly” the poet who bares her soul here. Like “A River of Words,” this book ends with a biographical note, making it a helpful source for school projects. Emily’s “flurries of cryptic notes and letters” and the cache of nearly 1,800 poems found by her sister after her death (with only a handful published anonymously in her lifetime) are facts that enlarge one’s understanding of this “nobody” who was in fact a very significant “somebody.”

For many people, the leap to reading poetry can be more than a little daunting, which makes it especially important to begin when we’re young and unafraid. These exquisite books should prompt a running start.

Sara London’s first poetry collection will soon be published by Four Way Books. She teaches at Mount Holyoke College.

Saffron · Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2008 9:52 am Post subject:

This is an excerpt from an article from the New York Times Poets & Poetry column. It is too long to post the whole thing on BT. I put the link to get to the rest of the piece at the end -- note: you will most likely have to sign up to get to the article, but it is free.

What Is Art For?
By DANIEL B. SMITH

Last April I asked the writer Lewis Hyde if he would take a trip with me to Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. At 63, Hyde has boyishly tousled brown-gray hair, freckled, soft-looking cheeks and the slightly abstracted gaze of a man who spends a disproportionate amount of his time in library carrels. He has an ironic streak, but his default mode is a kind of easygoing acquiescence, and so one slate gray Saturday afternoon he picked me up in Cambridge, where he lives and works half the year, and drove us the 12 miles west to Walden.

Hyde knows the area well — among his ongoing projects is a detailed series of annotations of Henry David Thoreau’s essays — and he led me down a dirt path from the parking lot to the site of the cabin where, more than 150 years ago, Thoreau wrote his celebrated paean to solitude and self-reliance. The cabin no longer exists. In its place there is a lightly excavated, cordoned-off square of soil and, to its side, a waist-high cairn erected in commemoration by generations of pilgrims.

Our own visit wasn’t commemorative, but it was a pilgrimage of a sort. Hyde has been writing and publishing for more than three decades, and he has received numerous high-profile awards, including a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1991, but his name is still obscure to most readers. His body of work is slim; he has published two books, a volume of poems and a smattering of essays, translations and edited anthologies. His reputation, however, is rich. David Foster Wallace called him “one of our true superstars of nonfiction.” Hyde’s fans — among them Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem — routinely use words like “transformative” and “life-altering” to describe his books, which they’ve been known to pass hand to hand like spiritual texts or samizdat manifestoes. The source of much of this reverence is Hyde’s first book, “The Gift” (1983), which has never been out of print (it was recently rereleased by Vintage in a 25th-anniversary edition) and which tries to reconcile the value of doing creative work with the exigencies of a market economy.

Hyde began his career as a poet in the naturalistic vein of Gary Snyder or Mary Oliver, but over the years he has transformed himself into an accomplished scholar. “The Gift,” the core argument of which depends on establishing an analogy between the making of art and how objects accrue value in traditional “gift economies,” has been praised as the most subtle, influential study of reciprocity since the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s 1924 essay of the same name. His second book, “Trickster Makes This World” (1998), a cross-cultural study of the mischievous, mythological trickster figure (examples from the 20th century include Duchamp, Picasso and Ginsberg), weaves together literary strands from West Africa, India and China and concludes with a new translation of the “Homeric Hymn to Hermes,” for which Hyde spent months working one on one with a tutor in ancient Greek. Jonathan Lethem told me that when he first read “The Gift,” he pictured its author as a kind of inapproachable seer, either long dead or soaring so high in the intellectual stratosphere as to be unreachable. “It’d be like reading a book by Nietzsche or Freud when they were alive and thinking, Oh, I gotta send this guy a note!”

Hyde’s admirers often point out with awe (and his reviewers with frustration) that his books are all but impossible to summarize. Hyde doesn’t object to this assessment. He wrote “The Gift” because he could find no place where his own motivations for writing poetry were well articulated, but articulating them required a poet’s suggestiveness. “One thing I’ve always liked to read is the kind of literature you find in Jung and Freud, which combines personal anecdote, philosophy, mythology, dreams,” he told me in his Cambridge office last May. “I like the way it jumps from one discursive realm to another.” His books exhibit this lively heterogeneity to an at-times dizzying extent; in the course of 12 pages in “The Gift,” Hyde hops from a discussion of a Pali Buddhist parable to Marx’s “Capital” to the Ford Pinto and then moves quickly on, in the next 3 pages, to Christmas, country-western music and the psychological fates of Vietnamese refugees in Southern California.

In the late 1990s, Hyde began extending his lifelong project of examining “the public life of the imagination” into what had become newly topical territory: the “cultural commons.” The advent of Internet file-sharing services like Napster and Gnutella sparked urgent debates over how to strike a balance between public and private claims to creative work. For more than a decade, the so-called Copy Left — a diverse group of lawyers, activists, artists and intellectuals — has argued that new digital technologies are responsible for an unprecedented wave of innovation and that excessive legal restrictions should not be placed on, say, music remixes, image mashups or “read-write” sites like Wikipedia, where users create their own content. The Copy Left, or the “free culture movement,” as it is sometimes known, has articulated this position in part by drawing on the tradition of the medieval agricultural commons, the collective right of villagers, vassals and serfs —“commoners” — to make use of a plot of land. This analogy is also central to Hyde’s book in progress, which looks closely at how the tradition of the commons was transformed once it was brought from Europe to America.

What is Art for?

DWill · Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2008 10:57 am Post subject:

This is not the most relevant response to the article, but noting Hyde's early "career" of making do and exposing himself to life seemingly at random, I always wonder about people I encounter doing drudge work, low-paid and low-status. Could any of these be people, like Hyde, with a gift? Could they be in the spot they're in out of refusal to do the expected thing, searching for the creative path? I suppose, though, for every Lewis Hyde who finds his path away from these circumstances to success on his own terms, there are thousands who don't, who have to merge more into the mainstream, compromising.

Hyde's is a name I've heard of but I've never read anything by him. Looks as though I should pick up The Gift, though. I like his point about the inescapability of culture's influence and how this corrects our myth of individualism. I also find intellectual property laws to be obnoxious in their current extreme form, too.

Another irelevancy: I disputed the author of the article on the distance from Cambridge to Concord. I felt this was a matter Thoreau would have cared about. It had to a lot be greater than 12 miles. But Mapquest put it at 14.7, which is close enough.

Saffron · Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2008 4:33 pm Post subject:

Robert Tulip · Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2008 9:39 pm Post subject:

Thanks Saffron, lovely story. My dad specialised in the spirituality of American poetry, looking at poets such as Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, Robert Lowell and others. People like Lewis Hyde whose motivation is their own integrity have a lot to offer. I'm interested in this idea of how the commons changed from England to America. I imagine the origins of the English use is lost in the mists of time, whereas the US would be more precise and legalistic. It is an interesting reflection on trust and nature.


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