The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (8 page)

BEHIND several theories of what happens to a poet during the writing of a poem—Eliot’s escape from personality, Keats’s idea of informing and filling another body, Yeats’s notion of the mask, Auden’s concept of the poet becoming someone else for the duration of the poem, Valéry’s idea of a self superior to the self—lies the implied assumption that the self as given is inadequate and will not do.

How you feel about yourself
is probably the most important feeling you have. It colors all other feelings, and if you are a poet, it colors your writing. It may account for your writing.

Mr. Auden believed that the fear of failure is the nemesis of American writers. We are so competitive, he says, that we want to destroy all other writers, want to write the one book that is so great it will eliminate all competition forever. Since the imagination cannot cope with such a task, the result is creative impotency. That, he says, is why so many American writers write one book of considerable promise and then nothing else.

Auden may have found this idea reinforced by his relations with Roethke. If you were beating Roethke in a game of 21 in basketball, he would complain throughout the game that he had thrown his right shoulder out years before and it had never come back. You didn’t have to be Jerry West to beat Roethke at 21, but his implication was clear. Were his shoulder all right, you, or Jerry West, wouldn’t stand a chance. He’d wipe you out, Buster.

Despite Roethke’s unconvincing and often endearing machismo, as a poet he found that failure haunted him far less than success. The possibility that the poem might fail some inner ideal may have been haunting, but acclaim from the outside demanded terrifying adjustments.

Many American poets seem to feel personally worthless unless they write. One can easily imagine that, given the conditions of the mind, the feelings of worthlessness may become indistinguishable from the impulse to write.

When people tell a young poet he is good, they may be doing him some disservice. They are telling him he is not worthless and so unwittingly they are undercutting what to him seems his need to write. I’m not suggesting we run about telling young poets how awful they are to ensure they keep on writing. They will tell themselves that often enough without our help.

I’ve known of cases where the poet’s behavior was adversely affected by “success,” that is, acclaim. Yes, I really am great and everything I put down is great so I don’t have to work hard anymore. Yes, I am great and so have license for whatever I do to others. No, I am not great. I am unworthy of this praise and once others see how outrageous I really am they’ll disdain me and I can get back to writing. I am great and will be a part of literature. Therefore, I must constantly grow through style changes to ensure my worth as an artist of stature.

It would be ideal if some instrument could be developed that could measure a writer’s capacity for success and then just enough acclaim, money, and praise could be doled out to keep the writer going.

Two classic American short stories: Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” and Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.” In Hemingway’s story, the protagonist, Krebs, by birth and circumstance is an insider. As a result of his experiences in a war and his own sensitivity, he feels alienated and outside. In Faulkner’s story, the protagonist, Snopes, a little boy, by birth and circumstance is an outsider who wants desperately to be in. He wants to be a part of what, from his disadvantageous position, seems a desirable life. His father is criminally insane and in his own mind can justify anything he does. Snopes is torn between loyalty to his father and the urge to protect “decent” people from his father’s viciousness. In the end, he informs on his father and as a result his father is killed while committing a crime.

Not from birth and circumstance, but by virtue of how they feel about themselves and their relation with the world, as revealed in their poems, many American poets see themselves as (or really are) Krebs or Snopes.

Krebs: William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Richard Wilbur, e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg.

Snopes: T. S. Eliot, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, William Stafford, Louise Bogan, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, A. R. Ammons.

Of the two, the Snopes poets would probably have a harder time handling success, since the Krebs poets could be successful without feeling they had violated their heritage. The Snopes poets would feel that their heritage has some deep emotional claim to their loyalties. The Krebs poets could write their best poems without fingering their fathers. The Krebs poets would feel that if something is wrong with their relations with the world, the fault is not entirely theirs.

Both would find success hard to adjust to. For a Krebs poet success means accepting values he knows are phony. For a Snopes poet, success could mean he has cast aside all people (including himself) he believes are doomed to failure and whom he continues to love. In both cases the result could be self-hatred and creative impotency.

Certain feelings can lead to certain stances in the poem. If the feelings are strong enough the stances may be overstances, or poses. This might result from extreme feelings of shame and degradation (Roethke) or intense self-hatred (Dylan Thomas). Such poets I find specially rewarding because they risk looking silly in their posturings. That may be why they appeal to the rest of us.

The mind, no matter how antisocial it seems, attaches outrageous importance to things others consider unimportant or dull. Poets of overstance admit this. When I read Eliot’s definition of the objective correlative, I sometimes have the urge to add at the end the words “in polite society.”

To feel that you are a wrong thing in a right world should lead a poet to be highly self-critical in the act of writing. Just as you must assume everything you put down belongs because you put it there (just to get it down at all) you must also assume that because you put it there it is wrong and must be examined. Not a healthy process, I suppose! But isn’t it better to use your inability to accept yourself to creative advantage? Feelings of worthlessness can give birth to the toughest and most welcome critic within.

Poets who fail (and by fail I mean fail themselves and never write a poem as good as they know they are capable of) are often poets who fail to accept feelings of personal worthlessness. They lack the self-criticism necessary to perfect the poem. They resist the role of a wrong thing in a right world and proclaim themselves the right thing in a wrong world (not the same thing as Krebs if that’s what you are thinking—Krebs doesn’t care much for the world or himself). In a sense they are not honest and lack the impulse (or fight it) to revise and perfect.

I feel so strongly about these matters that I am superstitious. I don’t know how many young people I’ve heard (usually men) proclaim themselves great artists and then fade into the woodwork. I believe that the moment you declare yourself great you put a curse on yourself. You can get away with it in baseball (Johnny Bench) or boxing (Muhammed Ali) if you have the physical gifts to back it up. But the poet who says “I am the greatest” has damned himself forever.

Jealousy is impossible for a poet because he has written every poem he loves. Among the beautiful poems I’ve written are “Leda and the Swan,” “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” “The Farm on the Great Plains,” “A Guide to Dungeness Spit,” and perhaps a hundred more.

When I meet a poet who is jealous of the
poems
of others (reputation is another matter), I’m sure that poet has not yet written a poem as good as he knows he can. When you have done your best, it doesn’t matter how good it is. That is for others to say.

If your life must be validated in all its anger and hostility to a world you don’t want (Krebs), or in all its regret and loneliness in a world that doesn’t want you (Snopes), the validation waits inside you to find itself in words on the most ordinary sheet of paper.

There are as many ways of feeling about oneself as there are people. What I am talking about is not limited to poets. In others it is often far more sad and far more seriously damaging.

However a poet feels about himself, he feels it in such a way that at moments he can play with the feeling.

I once believed Mallarmé’s statement that within him was that which would count the buttons on the hangman’s vest was a claim to cold-blooded objectivity. Now I believe it was acceptance of a world where the trivial and definite can vie for attention with the emotionally overwhelming.

Is Mallarmé’s notion so much different from the man who, after surviving a terrible auto crash and with his wife lying bloody in the car, steps out and begins to pick up small bits of glass? Are words bits of glass? Buttons on a hangman’s vest? On a lover’s clothes?

Should you reject yourself because you count buttons and pick up glass when all civilization tells you: please, this is hardly the time?

An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance.

One reason many poets drink so much may be that they dread the possibility of a self they can no longer reject. Alcohol keeps alive a self deserving of rejection. If the self as given threatens to become acceptable, as it often does after years of writing, it must be resisted, or the possibility that the poet will not write again becomes a monstrous threat.

When Faulkner, replying to the question, “Why do you drink so much?” answered, “For the pain,” he may not have meant to cure the pain. He may have meant to keep it alive.

Writing is a way of saying you and the world have a chance. All art is failure.

A long time back, maybe twenty-five years ago, a reviewer (
Hudson Review
, I think) ridiculed William Carlos Williams for saying one reason a poet wrote was to become a better person. I was fresh out of graduate school, maybe still there, filled with the New Criticism, and I easily sided with the reviewer. But now I see Williams was right. I don’t think Williams was advocating writing as therapy, nor the naive idea that after writing a poem one is any less depraved. I believe Williams discovered that a lifetime of writing was a slow, accumulative way of accepting one’s life as valid. What a silly thing we do. We sweat through poem after poem to realize what dumb animals know by instinct and reveal in their behavior: my life is all I’ve got. We are well off to know it ourselves, even if our method of learning it is painfully convoluted.

When you write you are momentarily telling the world and yourself that neither of you need any reason to be but the one you had all along.

I believe the reason Roethke sought out the wealthy for companionship during his last years was that he had come close to accepting a self he had once spitefully rejected. But he couldn’t believe it and wanted proof that the self he was starting to accept was truly of worth. In his mind, only the right and “well chosen” could verify this.

I believe the political conservatism of many poets in this culture is a personal conservatism mistakenly appropriated to politics, where it least belongs. If you are a wrong thing in a right world, then you should change and the world should remain the same. More important is the imagination’s impulse to create unknowns out of knowns (my thanks to Madeline De-Frees for this idea). If the knowns keep changing, the process of creating the unknowns is constantly threatened because the base of operations is unstable. It is natural though not necessarily healthy for poets to prefer a world left alone to remain just as it is forever.

A Snopes poet obviously finds conservatism natural. If Snopes grew up to be a political radical (an understandable development and perhaps a laudatory one), it’s doubtful he would be a poet. Though it is possible he would call himself one.

One problem for modern poets is the wholesale changes in what we see—the tearing down of buildings, the development of new housing, the accelerated rate of loss of all things that can serve as visual checkpoints and sources of stability. There is more than just temporal correlation between the destruction of the Louis Sullivan buildings in Chicago and the Sharon Tate murders in Los Angeles.

With the accumulated losses of knowns, the imagination is faced with the problem of preserving the world through internalization, then keeping that world rigidly fixed long enough to create the unknowns in the poem. (Rilke spoke of this.) Today, memory must become thought’s ally. Though the process becomes more complicated and challenging, I believe the accelerated loss of knowns accounts for the increasing number of people writing poems.

The self as given is inadequate and will not do. I remember I was distrustful of both Eliot and Roethke when late in their careers they announced they were happy. But they were being honest. Every poem a poet writes is a slight advance of self and a slight modification of the mask, the one you want to be. Poem after poem the self grows more worthy of the mask, the mask comes closer to fitting the face. After enough poems, you are nearly the one you want to be, and the one you want to be closely resembles you. The happiness Eliot and Roethke spoke of is one that cannot be observed by others because it is only a different way one has come to feel about oneself. “Nearly” and “closely,” not “exactly” and “perfectly.” Hope hard to fall always short of success.

I’LL TELL you some stories. I won’t press the point, but I hope these stories demonstrate some of the problems involved in writing. Problems of how memory and the imagination modify and transform experience, problems of stances you might have to take or drop to order language into a poem. Some of that heavy stuff.

In World War II I was a bombardier based in Italy. I was on the American side, but let me assure you the history books are right. We won. If you had seen me bomb, you might have doubts.

I was the world’s worst. One day I missed not only the target in the Brenner Pass, but the entire Brenner Pass itself, thirteen miles wide at that point. My fear made hard concentration difficult and I didn’t trust the equipment. I would glance over the bombsight as we approached the target, having made the siting and adjustments, and think: That doesn’t look right. The sight must be crazy.

In 1963 I went back. It was not easy. I was almost forty. My wife and I quit good jobs in Seattle and went to Italy to live for a year on savings. Once our savings were gone we would be broke and jobless. That worried me. I’d never had much confidence in my ability to find a job. If it hadn’t been for my wife’s courageous resolve, I could not have made the break. I tried for a grant—a Guggenheim, I think—but no luck.

Some friends urged us to go. Some people I worked with at the aircraft factory found it hard to understand what I was doing. One colleague asked me seriously why I was going to a land with all that violence. What violence? Imagine living in the United States and thinking Italy violent.

I really didn’t know why I was going. When people asked, the only answer I could find was: I just want to see it again.

I came to one Italy in 1944 and another in 1963. The 1963 Italy was filled with sparkling fountains, shiny little cars that honked and darted through well-kept streets, energetic young men and beautiful, well-dressed young women, huge neon signs that said
CIT
and
COMPARI
and
CINZANO
in bright blue or red or green.

The 1944 Italy I remembered brown and gray and lifeless. Every city, every small town reeked. No young men in the towns and no cattle in the fields. The war had taken the men and the Germans had taken the cattle. That was the Italy I expected to find when I came back. I hate to admit it, but that was the Italy I wanted to find. I fell in love with a sad land, and I wanted it sad one more time.

I must confess to a perverse side of self. I give and give to beggars, but there is in me something that feeds on the now of things. Of course I want it all better, want poverty gone forever from the world. But I also have the urge to say, “Stay destitute three more days, just until I finish my poem.” I’m ashamed of that in me.

There were good reasons for loving the sad early Italy, the best being that Italy was earth. The sky became more and more frightening as I neared my thirty-fifth bombing mission. If I made thirty-five I would go home. In the air I could disappear forever in one flash, fall to my death when my chute failed to open, or fall in my open chute to a German mob that would beat me to death as they had others. In the sky there seemed as many quick ways to die as there were thermals and flak bursts jolting the plane. I could age on earth, die slowly enough to make some final, corny speech—I’m a going, partner—the way they did in the old movies. On earth, you can say good-bye.

My first memory of Italy is a stone wall, about three feet high, grape vines, and a soft evening sky, a blue I’d not seen before. The wall and vines were close to the tent where our bomber crew spent one night on the outskirts of a town called Goia. I never saw Goia again. The next day we flew to the base where we would live for the next eight months. It took us eight months to fly thirty-five missions because the winter turned bad in 1944, and we lost a month of good flying weather in the fall when our squadron was assigned to fly gasoline to a British Spitfire base in Lyon.

The closest town of any size was Cerignola, eleven miles away. I still can’t say it very well. I find it hard to make the “gn” sound in Italian. This was the province Puglia (Apulia), on the Adriatic side, perhaps forty miles inland below the spur.

I found out later that Cerignola had a bad reputation in Italy. Some Italians considered it an unfriendly if not dangerous town. American G.I.s were to be off the streets by five in the afternoon. There were rumors of stabbings and robberies. I doubt they were true. If anything, we were the hostile ones, bitter at finding ourselves stuck in that lonely, austere land, caught up in a war we had nothing to do with starting. Since we never saw the enemy as we passed five miles above him on the bomb run, we imagined the Italians were enemies. Of course, until late in 1943 they had been, though often not very willing ones. If you are frightened and resentful, it’s easier if you have a defined enemy. On bad days, the Italians were our enemies.

The closest large city was Foggia, about thirty miles west. To get there, you had to go through Cerignola. I used to hitchhike to Foggia and sit in the Red Cross alone, drinking coffee, eating cookies, and listening to records. I played two over and over on the little player, Benny Goodman’s “Don’t Be That Way,” and Tommy Dorsey’s “Song of India.” I often hitchhiked those thirty miles just to hear Lawrence Brown’s trombone passage on the Goodman, or Bunny Berrigan’s trumpet solo on the Dorsey. After hearing the records many times, I would hitchhike back to the base across the drab, flat countryside.

The British had bases in the area, and I was fascinated by the British. One day in Foggia, I found a little hotel bar. The only other people there were the bartender and three English soldiers. “I say,” one of them said in an accent I found delicious, “will you ever forget your feelings when it was announced that Hitler had attacked Russia?” “Oh, I say. Wasn’t that the grossest miscalculation,” another answered. “Yes,” the third said, “if it hadn’t been for that, we would have been for it.” I’ve never forgotten that exchange. They seemed worldly to me, their view wide and deep.

Hitchhiking back from Foggia one day, I was given a ride in a British command car. I saw the colonel in the back seat lean forward and tell the driver to stop. The colonel was so poised, polite, and charming that I asked him if he was a member of the aristocracy, and he said he was. He was an earl. He asked me many questions about our missions, and I told him everything he wanted to know. I didn’t care that it was classified information. Enough close flak bursts had convinced me the Germans knew our altitude. Besides, I am loose-tongued by nature. Had I been captured, long before the Gestapo brought those blowtorches and pliers to my cell, I would have been known as Blabbermouth Hugo.

The colonel reminded me very much of the actor Herbert Marshall. I envied his composure, his gentility, and easy good manners. Although in no way did he register amazement or disapproval, I imagined he found it strange that a nervous, over-talkative, boorish boy could be an American officer. I had the impression he found me interesting but decided that was simply his aristocratic training—always let the serfs know you have a keen interest in their lives. I hoped that some day I’d perfect my own composure and detachment. I wanted very much to be like the earl, or Herbert Marshall.

Bob Mills, a pleasant, civilized young man, had attended Stanford University for a year or two. A bombardier, he had grown a long, handsome black moustache, and his warm, fluid personality got him elected president of the squadron officers’ club. He was given $500 in
lire
and the task of buying more liquor for the club. He was also assigned a jeep, and he asked me to go along with him to Barletta on the Adriatic coast where the liquor was produced and sold.

Among other dangers our imaginations had created was the danger of bandits, and we took our .45 automatics. I had my gun (piece, if you’re still G.I.) stuffed in my right trenchcoat pocket, and I felt a bit like Humphrey Bogart sitting there in the jeep as the olive trees and grass and magpies passed by. Mills drove, the huge wad of
lire
tucked away on him somewhere. It was a good way to break the boredom, bouncing through the Italian countryside.

Though, like most G.I.s, I couldn’t hit a cow with a .45 if I was holding her teat, the bulge and weight of the gun in my pocket gave me a sense of security. It is one thing to kneel, helpless, in the nose of a bomber jolted by bursts of flak fired five miles away by men whose names you will never know and whose faces you will never see. You trust to luck. You are not about to master your fate.

But this was the earth and the gun was real. The bandits who came pouring out of those hills would be real and I would shoot them. I and Bob Mills and Humphrey Bogart in our trenchcoats. We would blast them with our .45s and they couldn’t help but see our faces set in resolve, our glittering eyes.

We rolled into Barletta in about two hours, maybe less. The children picked us up and ran after us, filling the day with sisters for sale and pleas for cigarettes and candy. There must have been thirty already by the time we stopped at the distillery (perhaps not the right word), and more were running toward us. And great good soldier that I was, when I stepped out of the jeep my gun fell from my pocket and crashed to the stone street. I bent down to pick it up, and when I stood up the street was empty. Not a sound. Not a child anywhere. I stood in the eerie emptiness of that silent street and did not then comprehend what fear the war had put in those children. I wondered why they weren’t fascinated by the gun as, I was sure, American children would have been.

You’ll notice that the men I wanted to be are strong men, men in control. Humphrey Bogart. Herbert Marshall. Each in his own way tough. My urge to be someone adequate didn’t change after the war. When I gave up fiction as a bad job and settled back into poems for good, I seemed to use the poems to create some adequate self. A sissy in life, I would be tough in the poem. An example:

I don’t even understand that one anymore. Once I did, though, or I wouldn’t have published it. (I have a smattering of integrity, thank you.) Note how definite the voice is. How strong the command to the self tries to be. How the poem urges the man in it to accept reality in all its cruelty and diffuseness. And I even took a private pride in the difficulty of the poem. I wasn’t afraid of anything. No, sir. You don’t understand my poems? Screw off, Jack. But in real life, be my friend. Like me. Like me.

I went to Cerignola far more often than to Foggia. It was smaller but closer. All restaurants were off-limits in Italy during the war, and there were few places to go in Cerignola. The Red Cross, of course, but they didn’t have swing records. When I went to Cerignola, I usually got drunk in a little make-shift bar. The girl who waited tables was short, stocky, and stacked. The love-starved G.I.s watched her as she brought the
spumante
to the tables. They taught her to whip her hand along her hip as if she were a cowboy making a fast draw. Every time she did it, pointed her finger at us and depressed her thumb hammer, the soldiers howled.

The bar had a band, trumpet, accordion, and drums. The trumpeter’s best number was “Stardust,” and he played it often while the G.I.s rolled their eyes and exclaimed. I sat alone and drank
spumante
, listened to the music, watched the girl’s ripe behind bulge her dress, and wondered what the raucous enlisted men would think if they knew how self-conscious I was. Not because I was the only officer there, but because I was too timid to approach a woman and feared a lifetime of sexual deprivation. I laughed when I knew it was expected and made a point now and then of the attraction I felt for the girl. I could not have had her even if she had consented, but I wanted her and I could let the world know that.