The Practice of Poetry

Sometimes it seems like you know a poet after reading only one of their poems. Voice and sensibility can reveal itself quickly with utter disclosure. Hayden Carruth’s poetry feels like this. I came upon his collection Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey a couple years ago in the Seattle university district. It was an odd, dark day; the newspapers headlined Saddam Hussein’s hanging, and I sat at a bar sipping an Irish coffee and avoiding the news programs by disappearing into Carruth’s work. He felt immediately real & close. In the poem “California” he laments:

No longer do we
need an insane president to end us
by pushing a button. People
need only go on living as they are, without change,
the complacent and hard-eyed
everywhere.

Carruth’s voice speaks with a quality of humbleness and truthfulness which draws in the reader. This small snip from “Franconia” is exemplary:

Sparrows chirped in the rafters, moths
wandered in and out among shafts of moonlight.
Home is wherever these odd moments

snag our raft on the slow river of exile.

By the time we get to the “snag [of] our raft” we’ve been drawn in enough to feel the tug as a visceral sensation. This inward-pulling intimacy makes Hayden Carruth’s work easy to enter. It is also one of the reasons why even those of us who were distant strangers will miss him now that he has passed away. Sometimes, we are dear friends with strangers.

Today Ilya Kaminsky read at UC Berkeley for the Lunchtime Poetry series. Kaminsky is a poet whose first book, Dancing in Odessa, won the 2005 Addison M. Metcalf award, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year, and the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. Although his style is very different from Carruth, his poetry also succeeds at coaxingly and immediately drawing the reader in. After reading a few pages, you feel like you could recognize his work anywhere– you know it as you know an old, familiar neighborhood. Consider these lines from his poem, “In Praise of Laughter”:

…my grandfather composed lectures on the supply

and demand of clouds in our country:
the State declared him an enemy of the people.
He ran after a train with tomatoes in his coat

and danced naked on the table in front of our house–

Yet almost as soon as Kaminsky begins reading, all pretense of knowing disappears; where one would assume calmly whispered lines, he shouts or cries or releases with exultant exclamations. The rhythm of his reading voice is punctuated with lifts and plummets. His reading voice moves much like the display of the hummingbird I watched this weekend: climbing high, hovering far above the coyote brush, and then dropping like a runaway elevator. The poems whirl in a voice that reminds me of Yeats.

The movement between these layers of knowing and unknowing makes poems changeable and often, somehow, new experiences each time we read or hear them. Our experience of a poem changes depending on the ways we are experiencing the historical moment, the weather, or our own mood. If we are solitary and reading at a bar with a whiskey and coffee, or if we are surrounded by a crowd and watching the poet lean into the podium and fill the room with striking, passionate clamor we will experience the poem in a new and different way. Such understanding is the intimacy of things that grow and live and thrive.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS