|
A POET YOU MAY WANT TO KNOW BETTER: HAYDEN CARRUTH Marilyn Hacker profiles a jazzy American nature poet |
|
| ‘Where I am is the cosmic individual. Nothing grand, nothing romantic. A duck blown out to sea and still squawking.’ (‘Fragments of an Autobiography’) In many ways, Hayden Carruth is a quintessentially American poet, his work precisely what an exacting European reader would expect or wish an American poet to have written. Or at least, that is my inference as a transatlantic American. Carruth is rooted in particular American landscapes, specifically Vermont and upstate New York (he was born in Connecticut in 1921) and these locations have not only been central to (and productive of) his work; they have been the subjects of his most profound poetic analyses and meditations — as well as the necessary settings of dramatic monologues and narratives. Whereas Robert Frost gave his readers New England in a kind of fixed, trans-historical and almost theatrical present (that of the early twentieth century), Carruth’s excavations examine the socio-political, literary, even geological histories of his locales, and project them into a very contemporary present and, by implication, into a pessimistically-viewed future. The implications of Carruth’s poetry are never limited by a locale: its specificity is its point of departure for a humanist universality; its accessibility and its creation of complex personae, engaging or rebarbative, are the basis for the lyrical complexity of its deployment of words, syntax and metrical music. Though Carruth has never been an urban poet, jazz, that most urban and American of art forms, informs his work from myriad directions, whether that be the re-creation of a legendary but historical jam session in 1944 (at which he was not present), a comic-bawdy neo-Greek myth of the newborn Hermes inventing the saxophone in Harlem, or in the application of jazz’s techniques of improvisation upon received melodies/forms to numerous and varied poems. He has been an enthusiastic amateur jazz and classical clarinetist. (Suicides and Jazzers is one of his books of critical essays; Doctor Jazz is his most recent book of poems, and the title of Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, his 1996 National Book Award-winning collection, refers to a jazz group’s 5 am breakfast after an all-night gig. ) For a variety of reasons, including agoraphobia, Carruth, except for his Army stint in World War II, has remained almost consistently in the United States, in his corner of it — unlike his near-contemporaries of the previous decade, Lowell and Bishop, and his coevals James Wright, Carolyn Kizer and James Merrill, all of whose ‘cosmopolitanism’ counterpoints their American identities (and Bishop was Canadian by birth) at many turns. Nor did Carruth emerge from an ‘Ivy League’ university. Yet the polymath breadth and depth of his knowledge, whether it be of prosody, the Napoleonic wars, the techniques of small farming, the influence of the troubadours and the Lingua d’Oc on Western civilization, geology, classical Chinese poetry or, again, jazz, is everywhere evident in his poems and essays, without ever assuming the boys’ club preciosity I sometimes associate with Pound or Lowell. Whatever information is imparted by Carruth is there as part of the flesh and bones of the poem. Carruth gives us ample facts about his own life and intellectual history in his poems, and in several of his essay collections, notably Suicides and Jazzers and Reluctantly (Copper Canyon Press, 1998): from childhood in Connecticut, a journalist grandfather, precocity in a state school accompanied by a creditable performance as an ordinary small boy, to a vivid description of the converted Vermont cowshed that was his studio for decades, his experience of fatherhood, and the explicit details of a 1988 suicide attempt. Yet if the ‘confessional’ school actually existed (a fact I’d question) his work in poetry, at least after the 1950s, is of another vein, in which the individual persona is primarily the vehicle of observation and transformation. The opening of ‘Essay on Stone’ (1978) is typical of Carruth: the title indicating some exposition, the modified alcaic stanza, the solid location, the gruff and local speaker letting us know quickly enough that there will be a counterpoint between a fixed place and season and the mental traveler’s departures: April abomination, that’s what I call The flowers of May will come next week — in theory. Carruth has always been, among his many other attributes, a ‘nature poet,’ that is, a poet who observes the natural world around him keenly, and makes use of that fine observation — which is of the same order as his observation of the interworkings of a jazz quintet, or of a the body of a woman standing in his bedroom’s moonlight. He knows the way light in his meadow changes daily with the mutable seasons, the names of its wildflowers, the lives of its trees, as well as the precise actions and physical stresses required to split a cord of wood with an axe — the subject or occasion of several poems. But the observation of nature rendered into a lyric is rarely the goal of his poems. It is the intersection of human consciousness (another aspect of ‘nature,’ after all, upon which the idea of ‘Nature’ depends) with tree, stone, rock, river, meadow: the human mind observing its own divagations — whether it’s the interrogation of Heine in the poem above, or a reflection on the processes that lead to the beauty, formality and strangeness of the ‘natural.’ The snow sculpts this object, (‘Loneliness, an Outburst of Hexasyllabics’) Carruth is one of the most prolific poets of his generation. Writing this, I think of another poet, eight years his senior, Muriel Rukeyser, equally polymath, equally prolific, equally political, and equally out of the ‘mainstream’ critical eye. While they were marked, as is any American poet born after 1910, by the seismic shock of Modernism, their work cannot be placed easily either in any of its currents or in the counter-current represented by lyricists like Millay or Randall Jarrell. This may have something to do with the paucity of criticism devoted to their work: in Rukeyser’s case, a silence that lasted through the McCarthy era and the ascendance of the New Criticism till the women’s movement; in Carruth’s case, an inadequacy of response that seems to continue today. Rukeyser was a democratic socialist and urban as Carruth is rural; Carruth, the countryman is a self-proclaimed anarchist. She was an activist and, I believe, an optimist about human possibility. He, prevented by agoraphobia and temperament from extra-literary political action other than sheltering draft resisters in the 1960s, thinks otherwise: Now tell me if we don’t need a revolution! Black This is from the twenty-second of a series of twenty-eight ‘Paragraphs’ written in the late 1970s (which, I might amend, finishes with the apotheosis of the five-man jazz recording session in 1944 that could be taken to contradict the implications of the above). The ‘paragraph’ is one of Carruth’s many prosodic inventions, one of which he has made use frequently over some forty-five years in four significant sequences (to which I’ll return). Carruth is the author of, by my count, 23 books of poems (not counting Selected or Collected volumes) , a novel and six collections of essays. These last include a thoroughly idiosyncratic ‘meditation’ on Camus’ The Stranger, published in 1965, which resembles a contemporary French ‘autofiction’ more than a critical essay , in which a surrogate of the writer interacts with fictional and fictionalized characters — here, Camus himself and characters from Camus’ other novels. (Again as a point of reference Rukeyser’s books on Wendell Wilkie and the physicist Willard Gibbs: these are two poets for whom encounters, on the page, with minds and ways of thinking different from their own have been essential.) Carruth is a virtuoso of English prosody and all those metrics and strategies which can be transposed to English. Unlike some of his friends and contemporaries, he does not seem to have had a ‘conversion experience’ moving him from fixed to open forms (I notice now that his compendium collections do not include much work written before his mid-thirties), but has used both fluently and to the strongest effect from the outset. Furthermore, though he is an accomplished sonneteer and has frequently worked with terza rima, nonce forms, from the simplest to the most complex, have been the instrument and source of much of his strongest work. ‘Loneliness: An Outburst of Hexasyllabics,’ quoted above, is an up-country dark night of the soul following the speaker from dusk till dawn in deepest winter in seventy-odd six-syllable lines. I’ve also mentioned the ‘paragraph’. This is a form Carruth devised in 1957 during internment in a mental hospital, to keep himself sane, one gathers, and the first sequence he produced in the form, on that occasion, is called ‘The Asylum’. The ‘paragraph’ is a fifteen-line poem, which, like a sonnet, can most often both stand alone and work in sequence. It has a fixed rhyme scheme, and a fixed variation in the number of stresses per line (it is accentual rather than accentual-syllabic, though there is quite a bit of not-necessarily inadvertent iambic pentameter in most of them) With the letter representing rhyme and the numeral the number of stresses, the template would look like this: 5A A carpet raveling on the loom a girl The poem I’ve used to illustrate the template is from ‘Contra Mortem,’ a sequence of 30 paragraphs written in 1966, in which Carruth ‘loosened’ his own strict form somewhat (one could read lines 8 and 12 as having five stresses) as well as being freer with punctuation, which here follows the trajectory of a free-associative but directed thought-and-image process. The apotheosis of the paragraph as form and as the fueling energy of a book-length poem came with ‘The Sleeping Beauty,’ written between 1970 and 1980 (reissued by Copper Canyon Press in 1990). This 125-poem sequence uses the fairy/folk-tale figure, connected to Carruth initially by the name of his third wife, Rose Marie Dorn (the Dornröschen, Briar Rose, is the Sleeping Beauty in German) as a focal point for a meditation on history here not-entirely aleatorically embodied by a series of emblematic ‘H’-initialled figures including Heraclitus, Hermes, Hector, Hölderlin, Hegel, Hitler — and of course Hayden — all episodes in the Beauty-persona’s dream. But there are several other fugal, contrapuntal themes threading the sequence: the narrator’s dialogue with a probably-revenant old Vermont farmer named Amos; and a series of monologues in female voices — Lilith; a foot-bound Chinese lady of 16; a Puritan poet whose husband burns her writings; Bessie Smith. The Sleeping Beauty is in fact also a profound consideration of gender and its permutations, its wounds, in each human being (in particular in the Jungian sense of anima/ animus, response of and to the ‘opposite’ within each of us, whatever our sexuality). It is perhaps not accidental that the sequence was written during the rise of the ‘second wave’ of the American and British feminist movement (feminist poets Carolyn Kizer and Adrienne Rich are among Carruth’s oldest friends).Yet I have never seen it analyzed in that context: a male poet’s response to and attempt to integrate the damages of gender polarity — except by Kizer, who wrote of it, upon its publication in 1982, ‘Those two great contemporary issues, recognition of women and respect for our fragile world, are bound together in profound unity.’ Another of Carruth’s tours de force is the eminently readable Asphalt Georgics. These are poems about the lower-middle-class white inhabitants of the prefabricated towns clustered around strip malls in upstate New York, largely dramatic monologues. Again Carruth invents a form: in this case quatrains of alternating eight and six-syllable lines, with the second and fourth rhyming, often deliberately using hyphenations in the rhyme lines. At times the poet-persona intervenes; in the opening , longest ‘Georgic,’ ‘Names,’ there’s a constant metamorphosis. A husband driving to the mall: Friendly and Ponderosa of a big jagged hole through both way on the gravel strip… is eventually a political prisoner caged in a steel box in Latin America: My name was Julio. But now ed light that scintillates round the My name is Santa Julia. his/her out-of the body state ….attainable by themselves completely and abso- In ‘Marge,’ Carruth makes a different kind of audacious narrative move. In this monologue, an isolated 60-year-old ex-alcoholic recounts the story of a lively friendship between the speaker and an older woman, his ‘landlady,’ whose death at 85 has left him desolate and destitute. But the woman, from her name, and the account of her illness and death, is Carruth’s mother (her own life and prolonged death elegized in a long poem written in 1981) who died when the poet was sixty. The details of ‘Charlie Spaid’s’ recovery are congruent with Carruth’s, though the rest of the persona’s life is presumably invented. Does the poem incorporate Margery Carruth’s death in a fiction, or posthumously bestow upon her a fifteen-year quotidian companionship, never qualified as filial? The poem, like Carruth’s Camus book, skates on the edge of two different modes of narrative, and is the more effective for it; it is also a hub around which the created community of the ‘Georgics’ revolves. It’s evident that in Carruth’s poems, the ‘local’ is never merely parochial, and the personal may be either or at once political, fictional and universal. Carruth has published two new collections since the Collected Shorter and Collected Longer Poems of 1992 and 1994: Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey (1996) and Doctor Jazz (2001), whose appearance marked his eightieth birthday. Carruth has explored innumerable modes and forms in his career, and these books pursue many of them – historical permutations (Timor the Lame; Waterloo), erotic lyrics to his wife, new paragraphs, a memorial poem for the soprano sax-player Sidney Bechet. Central to the last book is a 16-page elegy for Carruth’s daughter Martha, dead of liver cancer in her forties. This seems, at first approach, like an expression of unmediated grief and fury, the almost unapproachable raging of a contemporary Lear. But it is no more unmediated than (as much written as) Lear’s soliloquies, or than the existential solos of Coltrane or Charlie Parker, whose artistry and discipline is such that it informs and forms any ‘free flight’ under the pressure of extremity. Carruth has had lengthy and fruitful relationships with two editors, unusual in these days of corporate editorial anonymity: James Laughlin of New Directions, upon the occasion of whose death Carruth wrote a book-length memoir-tribute, and Sam Hamill of Copper Canyon Press. The two were or are poet-editors; Hamill is, as well, a scholar and translator of Chinese poetry. Carruth has frequently held dialogue with other writers in his poems: Heine, Ovid, Paul Goodman, Camus, Levertov, Laughlin himself. A new mode in this dialogue perhaps comes to Carruth via Hamill: two sequences that engage classical Chinese poets, ‘A Summer with Tu Fu’ and ‘Bashö’. As in all his interrogations of other aesthetics, Carruth grounds his persona firmly in his own landscape and particularities — which bear a certain relationship to those of the exiled Tu Fu, in the sixth century, and the eccentric haiku master Bashö in the seventeenth. The Bashö sequence is cemented by quizzical haiku: After the setbacks to a cowshed nine in the mountains near (‘The Matter of Huts’) Carruth in his curmudgeon persona grouses or exults that, at 80, he has another fifteen-hundred-year poetic tradition about which to learn — in which he is already immersed and engaged.
Effluences from the Sacred Caves: Selected Essays Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 Asphalt Georgics Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous
River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995 Doctor Jazz (hbk) Selected Essays Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays Brothers, I Loved You All: (Poems, 1969-1977) (hbk) Suicides and Jazzers (hbk) Collected Longer Poems (hbk)
|
|
Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
|
|