Barbara Ras and Ellendore Watson

The visit by Barbera Ras and Ellendore Watson was particularly interesting for a variety of reasons. First, Barbera Ras is the chief editor of Trinity Press, so there was a locol interest. Secondly, Ras and Watson had been friends for decades from when they were just beginning to write. There's was a relationship not unique nowadays, but which is a critical one. Contemporarily, the literary world is ruled by MFA programs; they give creative writing a degree of professionality. People with MFAs are qualified to teach at universities and then at MFA programs. Watson teaches at Smith College and is the editor of the Massachusetts Review, a well-recognized literary magazine.

So, here are the two writers; Ras (left) and Watson (right).

When they showed up they set up a kind of pair reading, where they would trade off reading poems and telling stories. It was hard to actually ask the two questions, because the topic was slanted towards the perspective of their relationship. But I will say, they had a fun dynamic between them, and often their personal stories behind their poems were better than the actual poems.

From the vantage point of the Lennox Seminar, theirs posed a new relationship between poet and society. A relationship based off poetry seeks approval. And that was what some of their stories were, of them e-mailing poetry back and forth. One would read and critique the other. They knew their poems were nearly finished when the other gave them the green light. I don't know if this is the best process; it bases a lot of its success on the aesthetics of one individual. It is an attractive notion though, to have a partner i writing.

The Hass

I am so excited about this poet, the third poet in the series. He is the former Poet Laureate of the United States, Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winnder, two time recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award. I am talking about Robert Haas, maybe the most presitigious living author in America. Jenny Browne did an excellent job in bringing him to the Lennox Seminar.

I was able to see both his reading and his lecture to the class. A lot of us there had read his poetry for the class as well as from other places; we all knew of him before Jenny Browne brought him to the seminar, unlike the other poets who we were not familiar with. Hass is a very influential poet and has changed poetry greatly by his example.

It was interesting to hear how "old-fashioned" his tastes in poetry are. He recited a couple of poems during the lecture. One, a poem from the court of Henry VIII, so a sixtienth centurty poet. The second was a poem by Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", that famous poem that begins, "Whose woods these are I think I know; / His house is in the village though. / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow." Considering how traditional his tastes are, his poetry is surprisingly different. He does not often use normal form in his poetry.

Heroic Simile

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai
in the gray rain,
in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
he fell straight as a pine, he fell
as Ajax fell in Homer
in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
the woodsman returned for two days
to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,
hacking the small limbs off,
tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;
the logs from midtree they halved:
ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
moons and quarter moons and half moons
ridged by the saw's tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle
are standing in midforest
on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.
They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. They are too canny
to call in neighbors and come home
with a few logs after three days' work.
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!
The old man smokes a pipe and spits.
The young man is thinking he would be rich
if he were already rich and had a mule.
Ten days of hauling
and on the seventh day they'll probably
be caught, go home empty-handed
or worse. I don't know
whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean
and there's nothing I can do.
The path from here to that village
is not translated. A hero, dying,
gives off stillness to the air.
A man and a woman walk from the movies
to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.
There are limits to imagination.

Robert Hass is also an active enviromentalist, which goes toward what he sees to be the role of poets in society. He believes the role of the poet is to call to attention, to be the "namer of things unnamed". By calling attention one gives significance and importance.

The Second Poet

The second poet to visit Trinity was Rigoberto Gonzales, a homosexual latino poet and activist. Rigoberto represented a stark contrast to Stephen burt, because his primary identity was his activism. His poetry, as he put it, was just a facet of his activisim in the latino community. One of his most prestigious awards was the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

I was not a part of the interview group, nor was I able to go to the reading, because it was scheduled for the friday night before spring break and I had to be in Houston, so all I have to go off of was what was discussed in class. Something I found very interesting about Rigoberto was that he was very reserved about reading his poetry. Rigoberto falls in the genre of a confessionalist poet, so the poetic I in his work is usually his I; the experiences of the poem are his experiences. So when it came to reading, he sometimes refused to read poems that were too close to him. One such poem was about a lover who had died in a car accident.

As far as Rigoberto's theories about the role of poetry in society, it was completely different than Burt, again. Rigoberto saw reading literature as almost a moral imperative. One was made knowledgeable about the human experience by reading, and that knowledge would lead to understanding. Burt saw poetry as being weak when it was meant for catharsis; he had written article criticizing people's sudden turn to poetry after 9/11, but for Rigoberto it was all about the experience and relating to others.

I think his poetry is much simpler than Burt. Here is a prose poem by Rigoberto:

Confession

Tell us again, father, about the priest who couldn’t fit his fingers in your mouth so youhad to suck on the Eucharist as soon as it touched your lower lip. His hand radiatedwarmth like a canine’s breath and suddenly the sound of a shirt coming off, and suddenlythe door bandaging light, the darkness flat across your body and nowhere the mercifulword for Christ. The nipples were aflame, but whose? Bleat in the throat, Biblical goatthat sniffs the sticky fluid of its spilled death and what a betrayal it is to move through theworld with a pair of eyes only to have it end with the nose. Tell us, father, how it aches tohave a fat thumb brand its signature on the flesh—wound that makes you tear into thepillows of adulthood. Spare us the nights of grief, dear father, and warn us against thefierce desire of men before we drop into that ecstasy again of having a bastard drill thetwin fires to our chests.

The Lennox Seminar

A Lennox Seminar is an upperdivision class which brings visiting professors, or in this case poets, to lecture to classes and also to the general campus. This Spring 2009 the Lennox Seminar was held in the English Department and obliquely the Creative Writing Minor and was organized and led by Assistant Professor Jenny Browne. It is Jenny Browne, a poet herself and author of The Second Reason (University of Tampa Press, 2003), who did the selecting of poets and who gave a general question for the seminar, being, what is the role of contemporary poetry in society?

Six different poets on five different occasions will be visiting. The first of which was Stephen Burt, the poet and critic. The nature of the seminar is that each writer's visit involves three interactions. There first is the smaller, private, interview between the poet and a few students. The second is the lecture to the class. Third is a reading by the poet that is open to the campus and the general public.

I was fortunate enough to be one of the interviewers with Burt. My question during this seminar was to gauge the state of contemporary poetry and how it viewed itself in relationship to society. Burt is a poet who is heavily involved in the intellectual side of poetry. He is a professor at Harvard and has a blog on the Harriet Poetry Foundation site, a well-respected site for conversation which is part of Poetry Magazine, perhaps the best literary magazine in the country. I think this accounts for a certain disconnect between Burt's expectations for a reader and what typically happens.

Burt made the point in the interview that grade schools are not teaching poetry as much as they used to, and that students had less "technical knowledge" so as to read poetry better. By "technical knowledge", as far as I can assume, Burt meant the ability to deconstruct a poem for it's literary devices, aesthetics, and meaning. I asked the question if contemporary poetry required more "technical knowledge", to which he said no. However, as he continued to answer, it seemed he was mostly uncomfortable with saying poetry was slightly to blame for its contemporary disconnect.

Here is a poem by Burt:

At the Providence Zoo

Like the Beatles arriving from Britain,
the egret's descent on the pond
takes the reeds and visitors by storm:
it is a reconstructed marsh
environment, the next
best thing to living out your wild life.
*
Footbridges love the past.
And like the Roman questioner who learned
"the whole of the Torah while standing on one leg,"
flamingos are pleased to ignore us. It is not known
whether that Roman could learn to eat upside-down,
by dragging his tremendous head through streams.
*
Comical, stately, the newly-watched tortoises
mate; one pushes the other over the grass,
their hemispheres clicking, on seven legs
in toto. Together they make
a Sydney opera house,
a concatenation of anapests, almost a waltz.
*
Confined if not preserved,
schoolteachers, their charges, vigilant lemurs, wrens
and prestidigitating tamarins,
and dangerous badgers like dignitaries stare
at one another, hot
and concave in their inappropriate coats.
Having watched a boa
eat a rat alive,
the shortest child does as she was told?
looks up, holds the right hand
of the buddy system, and stands,
as she explains it, "still as a piece of pie."

I have chosen as a counterpoint a poet Burt describes as being unnapreciated in his time, T.S. Eliot:

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Disolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said,
"Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along
the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed:
"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets
And female smells in shuttered rooms
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars."

The lamp said,
"Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."

The last twist of the knife.

I think it is fair to say that Eliot's is the more accesible poem. It takes very little to be engaged by his poem. And this is the poet considered by most critics to be the most intellectual poet of the modern age.